


Terminal

by AuroraWest



Category: Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-11-21
Packaged: 2017-12-26 14:41:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 42,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/967148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraWest/pseuds/AuroraWest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three months have passed since Sugar Rush's reset, and things aren't going at all the way Taffyta Muttonfudge wants them to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The kart's wheels screeched as Taffyta drifted around the final turn in the Rainbow Ice Caves, giving her a boost of speed that sent her zooming past Crumbelina. She narrowed her eyes against the icy air and focused on Gloyd's taillights in front of her, shifting and accelerating and seeing the race's board in her mind. Fourth place. She passed Gloyd where the stalactite split the road without even looking at him. Third. Adorabeezle, in second, was close, and there, in first place but catchable, was Vanellope.

Taffyta grit her teeth and jammed the pedal to the floor, taking the curves too fast and whizzing by Adorabeezle. Second place. Not good enough. She had to get first, she just  _had_  to, she hadn't won a race for two weeks; this was the first time she'd been chosen by the game's randomizing roster to play in four days.

Pink Lightning's engine whined but Taffyta didn't let up. The gamers chose Vanellope more than any other avatar, practically every race, and Taffyta's popularity had fallen off a precipice steeper than the cliffs in the Frosty Mountains. Vanellope deserved the attention. She was a new racer as far as the gamers were concerned, she was the president, and she had a special ability.

Her sugar-frosted  _glitching_.

Only fair. The thing that had gotten her tormented for fifteen years was now her advantage. Taffyta didn't begrudge her the popularity, or the winning, not really. Not all the time. But it didn't change the fact that this was the last game of the night, and  _she had to win_.

She pulled level with Vanellope, who shot her a grin. Normally Taffyta would have returned it, probably with some light-hearted banter, but all of her attention was focused on the approaching finish line and making sure she crossed it first. The nose of her kart inched past Vanellope's, further and further—she was actually pulling ahead, she was in the lead! Only one thing could take her victory from her now—

There was a flash of blue, and Vanellope glitched across the finish line. In first place.

Taffyta had lost again.

She slammed on her brakes and squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to burst into tears. After all, she had to go stand up on the podium and act pleased about being second-best, and she didn't want her mascara running down her cheeks.

Adorabeezle punched her on the shoulder as she walked by on her way to the podium, saying, "Hey, nice comeback, Taff! Thought you were done for when you got stuck in that Sticky Slick back on Layer Cake Hill."

"Mmph," Taffyta said indistinctly. Adorabeezle would be happy with third, she hadn't placed all day.

At the podium, Vanellope accepted her trophy, sprinkle confetti flew, victory music played, and then the arcade was closing. With a frustrated sigh, Taffyta hopped down and dragged herself back over to her kart. In a few minutes, the next day's roster would go up on the board.

There had been a lot of changes since the game had reset and Vanellope had been revealed as  _Sugar Rush's_  true leader. Big changes, small changes, changes of all sizes in between. The biggest of them all, though, was the abolishment of the Random Roster Race. Its place had been taken by some kind of randomizer—Vanellope had tried to explain it when she'd presented the idea to them. Something about both possibilities being provided for in the code, and it only being a matter of flipping a switch. That was how Vanellope made it sound, though Taffyta doubted she understood it any better than the rest of them. Everyone had liked the idea, Vanellope had insisted on a vote, and _boom_! Faster than getting hit with a Sweet Seeker, every day's roster was randomly chosen by an impartial process somewhere deep within the code.

"Taffyta! Hey, Taffyta!"

She stopped in front of her kart and turned around. Vanellope was hurrying up to her. "Nice race! I can't believe you caught up with me, that was some pretty good driving, Ace!"

Half-heartedly, Taffyta returned the smile. "Not good enough, though. Congratulations on winning again, Pres."

"Thanks! And hey, you'll beat me next time." The president waved to Candlehead, Jubileena, and Citrusella, then turned back to Taffyta. "A bunch of us are gonna go to Licorice Meadow after the roster comes up, wanna come?"

Sticking a lollipop in her mouth, Taffyta hedged, "Maybe."  _That_ depended on whether or not she was  _on_  the next day's roster.

"Aw, c'mon, buddy!" Vanellope said, glitching over to Taffyta's side. In a wheedling tone, she added, "Citrusella's bringing some brambleberry soda…"

That gave Taffyta pause. Citrusella's brambleberry soda  _was_  really good. There were springs of the stuff just bubbling up behind her house in the Jelly Fruit Orchard. But before she could answer, there was a fanfare of midi trumpets The jumbotron lit up, and one by one, the nine randomly chosen racers went up on the board. Taffyta's eyes scanned the list and her heart contracted like a fist. Vanellope, Jubileena, Swizzle, Nougetsia, Snowanna, Sticky, Adorabeezle, Gloyd, and Minty. For the fifth time in a week, Taffyta wasn't on tomorrow's roster.

Her eyes filled with tears and she turned away from Vanellope, but not before catching the knowing—and pitying—look on the president's face. "I think I'm just gonna go t-take a drive," Taffyta said, trying to keep her voice from quavering.

"Okay…" Vanellope said, disappointment audible in her tone.

Taffyta jumped into her kart, but before she could start it, Rancis said, loudly enough for most of the racers to hear, "Don't be such a  _crybaby_ , Taffyta! I'm not up there either, see?"

She punched the starter on her kart and zoomed straight towards him, swerving within inches of his precious new kart that Vanellope had helped him make. "Hey!" Rancis yelped, but Taffyta didn't turn around. She hardly knew where she was going, all she knew was that she had to get out of there. They all felt bad for her, and she didn't want their stupid pity, she wanted to  _race_.

And Vanellope's pity was the worst of all. Every single time Vanellope had tried to cajole her into hanging out this week, Taffyta had just  _known_  it was because of the roster. As Taffyta hit the boost pad in Gumball Gorge and soared onto the next part of the Royal Raceway, all she could think was that the president was just rubbing in Taffyta's face how nice and forgiving she was. Who  _did_  that? Who looked at the ringleader of the people who'd bullied you for fifteen years and acted like you were best friends?

The G-forces on Layer Cake Hill's curves pressed her into her seat and she upshifted in the cookie straw at the top, then cut her engine entirely as she shot out towards the taffy ramp that led up into the Frosty Mountains. All she could hear was wind whistling in her ears, and she savored that sound for as long as possible. Then, at the last second, she started the engine again and revved it, shifting as her tires hit the road.

Snow began blowing across her face as she traveled into the mountains, and she pulled her visor over her eyes and scrunched down in her seat. During a race she didn't get cold up here, but this wasn't a race. This was her feeling miserable and going to the loneliest place in the game to wallow in that misery.

The air grew colder and the road icier. Taffyta could feel her wheels slipping and adjusted her driving. Her kart handled well in slippery conditions but she didn't feel like wiping out right now. With her luck, someone else would be up here and they'd see her do it and they'd probably tell her she shouldn't be on the roster  _anyway_  if she couldn't even drive when she was all alone and not even racing—

She careened around a sharp curve and the triple peaks of the Frosty Mountains came into view. Snow fell more heavily and wind gusted, and Taffyta flexed her fingers, stiff from cold, on the wheel. Then she slammed on her brakes. Her kart turned ninety degrees until she was skidding down the road sideways, but she was on a straightaway and kept Pink Lightning in the center of the snow-covered track.

When she stopped sliding, she turned off the kart and just sat there in the blowing snow, listening to the wind howl across the road. From this spot on the Royal Raceway, she couldn't see the stadium or the town square or the castle. All she could see were mountains and snow and off to one side, the turquoise sea far below.

Taffyta took her finished lollipop out of her mouth and flicked the stick away. Right in front of her was a barricade that said 'Danger: Road Closed'. Unwrapping another lollipop, she narrowed her eyes at the closed shortcut, by far the most dangerous one in the game. She'd only known one person who could successfully navigate it without dropping off into the never-ending chasm of the Rainbow Ice Caves. Just days prior to—to the game's reset, he'd insisted to her that she should try it. Taffyta had laughed and said she hated falling off the track, it made her sick to her stomach. Only thing on the race course that did.

King Candy had patted her shoulder and said, with that irrepressible laugh of his, "But you won't fall!"

She stared at the barricade, no longer really seeing it, and sniffled. He'd been so  _nice_  to her. He'd made her want to do anything for him. And she had, hadn't she? Taffyta had been completely awful to Vanellope, her princess, for fifteen long years. All for a liar, for an evil man who didn't care about anyone except himself.

A tear rolled down her face, hot against her cold skin. Rancis was right. She  _was_  a crybaby.

With a sigh, she re-started her engine. The only thing that could make her feel worse right now was thinking about  _him_. King Candy, or—or whatever his real name had been. Despite her best efforts, another memory snuck into her head.

_She was in the castle library, pulling books on kart maintenance off the shelves while King Candy sat at a table, his reading glasses perched on his nose. For the first time since the game had been plugged in, Sugar Rush's night was actually dark. Out-of-order signs covered both of the console's screens._

_It was all Vanellope von_ Glitch's _fault, of course, She'd run out onto the track in the middle of a race, glitching like always, and the gamers—admittedly a pretty inexperienced bunch, one of them kept choosing Taffyta and she'd been in eighth or ninth place every game they'd played—they'd run to Litwak immediately. The other racers had continued driving, but Taffyta, as one of the gamers' avatars, had rolled to a stop and used her side mirror to watch Litwak's face as he studied the glitch and her intrusion._

_Then the unthinkable happened. The signs were slapped down over the screens with two hollow clunks._

_Everyone was scared. Well, that was an understatement. Everyone was_ terrified _. Taffyta had gone to the castle because she couldn't sleep, and she wasn't surprised that King Candy was still awake, either._

 _"I sthwear,_ "  _King Candy muttered as he sat at the table, drumming his fingers, "that glitch is almostht enough to…to…to make me go Turbo!" He giggled at the phrase, though Taffyta didn't understand why it was funny, or what it meant._ _"I never should have let her out of the fungeon lastht time."_

_Sitting down across from him with a stack of books, she asked, "What's going Turbo?"_

_King Candy took his glasses off and steepled his fingers on the table. "Oh. You've never heard that?" He chuckled. "Justht sthomething they sthay in the arcade. You need to get out more, Missth Muttonfudge."_

_"I like it here," she said with a shrug. She'd been to Tapper's and Burgertime. They weren't that great._

_Putting a hand over his heart, he said, "You have no idea how happy it makesth me to hear that."_

_She smiled at him, though she could tell he was sort of joking. Sort-of-but-not-really. "So what does it mean? Going Turbo?"_

_There was a funny look in his eyes for a second. "It'sth when you abandon your game."_

_Taffyta sat up straight, horrified by the thought. "Who would—you wouldn't actually do that, would you? Not over the glitch? I mean, she's in the fungeon, she can't cause any more trouble—"_

_King Candy held out his hands, palms facing her and fingers splayed. "Taffyta! Don't worry." He smiled at her. "If there'sth one persthon who'd_ never _go Turbo, you're looking at him."_

The memory faded, and Taffyta shivered from the cold. This was getting her nowhere. Sometimes she wished her memories could be locked up all over again.

With a sigh, she put her foot to the pedal and continued down the track. Maybe the randomizer would choose her tomorrow. If she could only race…that would go a long way towards helping her forget everything that was wrong—and the fact that everything was supposed to be right.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vanellope helping Rancis make a kart is a reference to the Wreck-It Ralph tie-in book, One Sweet Race.


	2. Chapter 2

But she wasn't chosen for the roster the next day. When her name failed to appear again on the board—Candlehead's, too, for the third day in a row, but Candlehead was endlessly cheerful and just brushed it off—Taffyta felt a scary, creeping desperation that she seriously thought, just for a second, might be the beginning of insanity. Was this what made you lose your mind? Watching the thing you loved get taken away from you while you sat there helpless, and powerless, and deep down you knew you were supposed to just live with it but everything in you screamed  _not_ to?

The difference today was that Taffyta was  _mad_. As the jumbotron glared down at her, she kicked at one of her kart's wheels, the one she'd lovingly replaced only four months ago. A lot of good it was doing her.

"Are you okay, Taffyta?" Candlehead asked.

Taffyta threw a half-finished lollipop to the ground. " _No,_  I'm not  _okay_ , Candlehead! That—that randomizer has something  _against_ me!"

"It can't," Candlehead said, sounding confused. "It's random. Vanellope said—"

"Yeah, well, Vanellope said a lot of stuff, but maybe she just wanted to be chosen as an avatar every day!" Taffyta spat.

Candlehead looked wounded at the president's expense. "I don't think so, Taff. She wouldn't do that. She wants everybody to race!"

Rolling her eyes, Taffyta said, "Yeah, right. If she wants everybody to race, why doesn't she drop out every once in awhile and let someone else take her spot?"

Candlehead considered this. "Well…the gamers really like her. They might be disappointed if she wasn't there—and I mean, that's what we're here for, right? To make the gamers happy?" Arriving at this realization made the other girl brighten. "So that's really what matters, Taffyta, you shouldn't take it personally!"

With a scoff, Taffyta said, "Oh, sure, as long as the  _gamers_  are happy, the rest of us don't matter!"

"Well…" Candlehead said.

Of course she was right. If the gamers weren't happy, a game got unplugged.  _Sugar Rush_  had been around long enough for Taffyta to see it. But right now she didn't  _care_ about gamers. She only cared about racing. She  _just_  wanted to race. She didn't even care anymore if she won or not. "Forget it," Taffyta muttered.

Candlehead's eyes crossed as she looked upwards, trying to see the candle burning on top of her head. Normally the gesture, which Candlehead always did when she was deep in thought, made Taffyta laugh, but she was too upset right now. She turned towards her kart and was about to get in when Candlehead said, "Why don't you talk to Vanellope about it?"

Taffyta froze, then turned around. "I can't  _talk_ to Vanellope about this! Are you crazy?"

"I don't  _think_  so…" Candlehead said earnestly.

Putting a hand to her forehead and rolling her eyes, Taffyta said, "Candlehead, do you even get how totally ungrateful and…and just plain awful I'd look if I went up to Vanellope and started complaining that I don't get to race enough?"

"But you want to race more, right?" When Taffyta looked at the ground, Candlehead grabbed her hands. "C'mon. I'll go with you if you want! Vanellope won't be mad and she won't think you're awful."

Taffyta scuffed her shoe on the ground. "I know she won't. Because she's nice."  _A lot nicer than you, Taffyta_. Biting her lip, she asked, "Do you really think it might help?"

"It can't hurt, right?"

Not the most encouraging words. But they made her feel a little better. Candlehead, at least, was on her side. Then again, Candlehead was on  _everyone's_ side, but…well, that wasn't important. "You don't have to come," Taffyta said, hoping Candlehead would insist that she wanted to.

"But I said I would!" the other girl chirped, a happy smile on her face. "C'mon, we can drive up to the castle together!" she added, skipping towards her kart.

Flames flared from the exhaust pipes of Candlehead's kart as she jumped in and revved the engine, and Taffyta followed her as she tore away from the stadium.

Taffyta hadn't actually been up to the castle since the game had reset. Vanellope didn't really like hanging out up there, and Taffyta didn't blame her. How could that place hold anything but bad memories for her? Still, it was a lot better than some abandoned, half-finished bonus level inside Diet Cola Mountain.

Vanellope had been totally nonchalant when she'd told them all about the place she'd lived for years. The rest of them hadn't been. Snowanna had stared, her hands covering most of her face, and Jubileena had burst into tears. And of course, Vanellope being Vanellope, when she'd seen how upsetting they'd found it, she'd really gone into detail, describing the falling Mentos, the splashes of boiling cola, the sponge cake bed that she'd stolen out of someone's garbage. And then at the end she'd said musingly, "I wonder how much of it's still there? I should go back and check!"

She'd probably done it, too.

Once they reached the castle and parked their karts in front of the gates, Sour Bill let Taffyta and Candlehead in via the front doors and led them down the long, no-longer-pink entry to the throne room. There were giggles and shouts of, "Awww, c'mon, that's no  _fair,_ Stinkbrain!" from ahead, and when the three of them reached the throne room, Taffyta saw that Vanellope's friend Wreck-It Ralph was there. The two of them were playing some game with cards.

"Taffyta Muttonfudge and Candlehead here to see you, Your Presidency," Sour Bill droned.

Vanellope looked up, then grinned at Ralph and said, "No fives. Go fish in a taffy swamp!"

Shaking his head, Ralph said, "You're killing me here, kid."

"Yeah, well, we can do best five out of seven if you want. What's up, guys?" she asked, bouncing to her feet.

For a second, Taffyta didn't answer, too engrossed in looking around the throne room. She'd spent so much time here in the past fifteen years, and now it was…different. Green, for one thing. The back of the throne was still in place, but the Royal Racer was nowhere to be seen, and without it, the throne looked half-finished. Well, it was. Obviously Vanellope wouldn't use a throne; after all, she was  _President_  von Schweetz, not Princess Vanellope, but there was a kind of emptiness to the room without it. In front of the throne, there was a desk with a cushy marshmallow chair pulled up to it and a hard candy name placard that read,  _President Vanellope von Schweetz_. Then, below that, in smaller letters,  _Keep your sticky fingers to yourselves!_

Candlehead answered for Taffyta. Given enough silence, Candlehead would always fill it. "Taffyta wanted to talk to you, Vanellope. Right, Taffyta?" The other girl elbowed her.

"Ow!" Taffyta rubbed at her arm. "Yeah. But if this isn't a good time…" No  _way_  she was going to say this stuff in front of Wreck-It Ralph. She'd never forget the way he'd charged over that hill into the junkyard when…well, that one day when Vanellope had entered the Random Roster Race with her pedal-powered kart. Still gave her the willies.

"Naw, it's fine! I was just in the middle of kicking Ralph's stinky caboose at Go Fish. Whatcha got?"

"Um," Taffyta said.

Ralph, watching the exchange, seemed to get the picture, even if Vanellope didn't. "Hey, kid," he said, standing up from his reinforced gingersnap cookie chair, "what do you say we pause this one? You can, uh…" His eyes landed on Taffyta and Candlehead and narrowed, and Taffyta gulped. After the way she'd treated Vanellope, she couldn't possibly expect Ralph, the president's protector and best friend in the world, to like her. "Why don't you talk to these two? I got a baking contest to judge, anyway."

"What?" Vanellope laughed. " _Baking_ contest?"

"Yeah," Ralph said, grinning at her amusement and crossing his enormous arms across his equally enormous chest. "Hey, the Nicelanders know how much I like pie, and  _you_ know I can't bake worth anything. Makes me a perfect judge."

Laughing again, Vanellope said, "Okay, Ralphie. Hey, save me a piece of the winner, will ya?"

"Sure thing, kid." Ralph smiled at her again with such warmth and—and love, that Taffyta incongruously felt herself turn cold. Vanellope really  _did_  have everything now. Ralph ruffled her hair as he walked by her. And as he passed Taffyta and Candlehead, he glared, pointed with two fingers to his eyes, and then towards them.

Candlehead squeaked and Taffyta muttered, "Yeah yeah, we get it." Couldn't he give her a  _break_? If Taffyta had known Vanellope was the princess…but she knew Ralph didn't care and didn't see it that way. She'd tried to talk to him a couple times, just stupid chit-chat stuff, but she could tell he was only being sort-of-nice to her because Vanellope wanted him to be.

When the castle doors closed behind Ralph, Taffyta looked at her feet and moved the toe of her shoe back and forth across the seam between the tiles she was standing on. The egg-wash grout was cracking. She was really regretting coming up here, and now everyone, even Sour Bill, was staring at her, waiting for her to speak.

Poking Taffyta in the arm, Candlehead said, "You wanted to talk about racing?"

"I know what I wanted to talk about!" Taffyta said, shrugging away from Candlehead. Then, she looked at Vanellope, whose head was cocked. Taffyta sighed. "Vanellope, I…" The best way to say it was probably to just  _say_ it, no beating around the popcorn ball bush. "It's driving me crazy that I'm never on the roster."

Vanellope winced. "Oh. I was wondering how long it'd be until you brought that up."

"So you  _know_  how much it's bothering me?" Taffyta demanded.

"Everyone kinda does, Taff," Candlehead piped up.

"Nobody asked you," Taffyta snapped, then felt immediately terrible as Candlehead recoiled, her lip trembling. But instead of apologizing, like she knew she should have, she balled her hands into fists at her sides and said, "It's not  _fair_. I'm practically the best racer in this  _game_  and I've barely raced in  _forever_! That randomizer  _never_  chooses me!"

"Taffyta, look, I'm really sorry!" Vanellope said. And she sounded sorry. She did. But sorry wasn't going to cut it. "Honest! But it's random, I'd have to go mess with the code—"

Every frustration and irritation, every time she'd hated Vanellope just a little for her glitching—her unfair advantage, that was really what it was—and for the fact that the randomizer picked the president for the roster every day, and, deep down, for the fact that now Taffyta was no one's favorite, all of it boiled over suddenly, like syrup at the hard crack stage.

"So  _mess_  with it!" Taffyta yelled. "King Candy would have done it for me!" As soon as the words left her mouth, she clapped her hands over her face. Vanellope looked like she'd been slapped, and Taffyta felt tears prick at her eyes. "Oh—no, I didn't—I didn't mean that, Vanellope, I swear I didn't mean that."

Candlehead's eyes were wide as she looked back and forth between the two of them, and she echoed, "She didn't mean that, Vanellope!"

Vanellope recovered quickly, smiling and waving a hand, but it was obvious she was hurt. Not much of a liar, Vanellope. Something that her and King Candy didn't have in common. "Don't worry about it." The words had no effect, and Taffyta's eyes stung as tears spilled over. She hated herself for it.  _Crybaby_.

"Aw, Taffyta, don't! Seriously, it's not a big deal!" Vanellope wrung her hands together, which Taffyta could barely see through the blur of tears, and the president looked towards Candlehead for support.

"Yeah, it i-is!" Taffyta sniffled. "He was a—a— _hic_ —monster, and he tried to delete your code, and how could—how c-could I—" But she could. She  _did_. She hadn't let go of a friendship that had meant nothing.

Vanellope grabbed Taffyta's hands and gripped them tightly, but Taffyta's fingers stayed limp. She didn't deserve Vanellope's kindness, when half the time she stewed about the president and her popularity and her skill and her special ability and, and, well  _everything_. After years of torment from Taffyta and the rest of the racers, Vanellope had been nothing but nice, and Taffyta was…was wishing for a time when…

"Hey, I know…" Vanellope hesitated. "I know things are, like, really different around here. And it's a lot to get used to. It is for  _me_  too, Taffyta! I get it, don't cry." She hesitated, like she knew that she was taking a chance on her next words. "I know that…that you and King Candy were friends."

Taffyta felt her code turn to ice. Who'd told Vanellope that? It had been Rancis, she just  _knew_  it, he'd always teased her about the friendship. Or maybe it hadn't been Rancis, maybe it had been Crumbelina, she'd always been a little gossip. Or—or Jubileena for that matter, or…pixie sticks, it could have been any of them, because they'd all known. They'd all seen that Taffyta was King Candy's favorite. But she'd thought they had the brains to keep it to themselves. Turning to face Candlehead, she demanded, "Did you _say_  something?"

Candlehead twisted her fingers together. "Oh, no, Taffyta, I wouldn't ever…"

"No one said anything," Vanellope interrupted. She stuck her hands into her hoodie pocket and admitted, "I'd see you and him sometimes, practicing. Or just driving around." A flicker of sadness glitched across her face, and Taffyta knew how Vanellope must have felt back then. Not only had Taffyta been one of the best and most popular racers in the game, but she'd had someone who was like a best friend and a father rolled into one. At least, Taffyta had thought so at the time. She knew better now.

And she also knew that Vanellope pitied her, because now their positions were reversed.  _Vanellope_  was the popular one, the best racer in the game, the one with a family. Taffyta's family—the man she'd thought had loved her like a daughter—had been nothing more than a lie.

She hated herself for wishing it hadn't been.

"So I guess not ever racing is like, what, my punishment or something?" she spat. "Because he—he tricked me, and pretended to be my friend, and I fell for it?"

Vanellope's eyes were huge. "What? No!"

But Taffyta was beyond talking now. "Well you know what?" she yelled, feeling like she was suffocating. "Fine!  _Fine_! I don't even  _need_  this, I don't need to wait around for your stupid randomizer to pick me! If  _you_  don't want me to race, then I'll just  _leave_!"

With that, she whirled and ran as hard as she could out of the throne room, out of the castle, ignoring Vanellope and Candlehead shouting at her to stop. She meant it. She was getting out of there. They didn't want her to race, the very  _code_  of the game was against her, and she didn't have to take it. The game didn't want Taffyta Muttonfudge as a racer? Fine. Taffyta Muttonfudge didn't want  _Sugar Rush_.

She was going Turbo.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Tapper's was busy, and that suited Taffyta just fine. The fewer people who took notice of her, the better. And the more people mobbed around the bar, the more she faded into the crowd. Mario was there, a group of admirers around him, and that helped a lot.

She needed the crowds to hide her, because ever since  _Sugar Rush_  had reset, everyone from the game, racers and NPCs alike, had become celebrities. Maybe more like curiosities. Everyone wanted to know what living under crazy Turbo had been like.

Taffyta, normally the gregarious ringleader, never engaged. The other racers did. Swizz loved it, he'd go on and on, making stuff up about how King Candy—only he never said King Candy, always Turbo—had done all these terrible things, like threatening to feed them to Skittles, the nasty fire-breathing uni-candy-corn. Once he'd elbowed her and said, "Right, Taff?" but she hadn't known what to do. Her instinct, like a reflex, had been to defend her king—but he wasn't her king. And she was smart enough to stuff that instinct away.

Sometimes, if he noticed, Tapper would come over and disperse the throng. Once, maybe seeing the way Taffyta stayed silent during these sessions, the bartender put a root beer down in front of her, unsolicited, and said, "You know, whatever he turned into, Turbo was still one of us."

She hadn't answered. Without touching the root beer, she'd left. She didn't want anyone thinking she harbored anything but hate for Turbo.

"Hey, kid."

For a second, the voice didn't register. But then there was another, more insistent, "Hey. Kid," and she knew she was being addressed.

But Taffyta ignored the voice, determined to stew in her own world. Which she totally could, because at the rate things were going, she was never going to race again in her whole life. Going Turbo didn't even matter, because in a game with fifteen racers to choose from, no one would ever even miss her. The gamers only needed nine, after all.

Taffyta swiped a hand across her face and reached for her root beer, but then that voice hissed, closer this time, "Hey, you. Little girl. Blondie."

She stared straight into her root beer, and then a hand reached out and pulled it away. "It's rude to ignore people when they're talking to you," the owner of the hand said.

Finally, she looked up, glaring at the stranger who'd taken possession of her drink. He didn't look familiar, just some buttoned-shirt-wearing pretty boy with frosted tips. She couldn't muster the curiosity to wonder what game he was from. "So I'm rude," she said. "Can I have my root beer back?"

"Say please," the guy said.

Taffyta grabbed for the tankard, meeting no resistance.

"Hey, a pretty little thing like you shouldn't be sitting here alone."

Making a gagging sound, she said, "I'm like, nine years old. Buzz off." What kind of sicko couldn't see she was just a kid? She searched the bar, wondering where Tapper was so he could rescue her from this jerk.

"Yeah, I know. You're one of those  _Sugar Rush_  kids, right? The game that Turbo took over."

She rolled her eyes. "Would you just leave me alone?"

He grinned and leaned an elbow on the bar. "Guess you're tired of talking about that, huh? Turbo this, Turbo that. The way this place has been lately, you'd think  _Sugar Rush_ was called  _TurboTime_."

Taffyta stared at him for a second, then turned away and stuck a lollipop in her mouth. "Yeah," she said, "I'm tired of talking about it."

"I get that." The man watched her, despite the fact that she refused to look at him. She could see him out of the corner of her eye. "What you need is a place where people don't care about that kind of stuff."

Hunching her shoulders, she said, "Yeah, I was  _in_  one until you showed up."

"Oh, come on. Someone was gonna come over here sooner or later and ask if it's true that Turbo sacrificed one of you kids to the volcano every year so he could be the best racer in the game."

She grit her teeth on the lollipop and it cracked apart. The worst part was, she didn't know what bothered her more, the fact that she'd already been  _asked_  this question, or the fact that what she wanted to say was,  _King Candy never needed to do so much as cheat to win. He_ was _the best racer in the game._

There was a long silence, and then the man asked, "So,  _did_ he sacrifice any of you to the volcano?"

Taffyta shoved her root beer away so hard that foamy soda sloshed over the sides onto the bar. Without a word, she hopped down off the bar stool and made her way towards the exit. Clearly, if she was going to go Turbo, she'd need to find a more secluded spot to do it.

Suddenly, the man was in front of her. "Hey, hey, Blondie, sorry. Just a joke."

" _Leave me alone_ ," she spat, turning around and heading towards the restrooms. Surely he wouldn't follow her in  _there_.

"Hey, look, I'm not trying to be a jerk. It's just that you look like you've got some stuff you want to forget."

Taffyta froze, then turned around slowly. "What did you say?"

Spreading his arms out, the man said, "Why don't you come with me? I'm from a game that I think is  _exactly_  what you need."

_No way_. This guy was a class-A creep and she'd have to be crazy to go with him. Then again, she could take care of herself. And she was going Turbo, right? You didn't go Turbo without taking some risks. "What game?" she asked.

He smiled. " _Extreme EZ Living 2_."

* * *

His name was Malcolm. Taffyta didn't recognize him.  _Wouldn't_  recognize him, actually. She knew about  _Extreme EZ Living 2_. Technically not even an arcade game, it ran on Litwak's laptop, which he kept open and running all the time. It was one of those sandbox, open-ended games that seemed pointless to Taffyta, which was one reason she'd never been tempted to go there.

The other reason was that it was the one place King Candy had forbade any of them to visit.

_"But_ everyone's  _going and it looks too cool!" Gloyd said._

_"Yeah," Jubileena said, bouncing up and down. "We've never been in a non-arcade game!"_

_"Everyone isth_ not _going," King Candy said. "Becausthe_ you're _not." There were cries of 'no fair!' and 'please, King Candy?' but he shook his head. "Listhten, thisth isth for your own_ protection _."_

_Crumbelina put her hands on her hips. "We've been in T rated games before!"_

_"Aha, well, yesth, that'sth my other concthern," King Candy said, pointing a finger at them. "But the main thing—hoo-hoo—the thing you have to worry about in a game like that, children, isth bringing back a_ virusth _."_

The beat-up sports car that served as transportation between Game Central Station and Litwak's computer turned sharply, knocking Taffyta out of the memory. They rounded a corner and the car shot out into a smaller, dingier version of Game Central Station. She didn't have time to get a good look at anything before Malcolm turned into an open doorway, lit by black lights, and they were in another tunnel.

The fact that King Candy hadn't wanted any of them to go to  _Extreme EZ Living 2_  was good enough reason to go now. She could defy him. She  _could_. Even if…well, even if it totally didn't matter anymore, and she was just trying to prove something to herself.

Virus. Huh. Yeah, he would have known all about that, considering that was what he'd turned into in the end.

Malcolm glanced over at her. "You sure spend a lot of time thinking, Blondie."

"What?" No one had ever accused her of  _that_  before.

Snapping his fingers in her face, he said, "We're gonna get your mind off whatever's bothering you."

A light appeared ahead of them and Taffyta flicked her lollipop away. That was why she was here—she'd stay until she couldn't remember why she'd left  _Sugar Rush_  in the first place. "So, what do you do in  _Extreme EZ Living 2_?" she asked. Milk Duds, was that name a mouthful. "Like, what's the point?"

"To have fun," Malcolm said. "What do you  _want_ to do? Beach party? Rooftop party? House party?"

"I'm kind of noticing a theme," Taffyta said. Then, she asked, "You have a beach?"

"Never ending," Malcolm said, stretching a hand out and gesturing towards the windshield. "Goes on forever."

She stuck another lollipop in her mouth and said, watching the walls flash by outside, "I like the beach."

"Beach it is, then!" Malcolm declared, speeding up towards the tunnel's end.

The car exited the tunnel into a clear night. Taffyta's mouth dropped open as she gazed up at a sky full of stars, arching over a white sand beach with perfect cerulean surf. Tall, sculpted men and women in…well, not much, were frolicking in the gentle waves or lounging on the sand. Tall buildings bristling with balconies abutted the beach, colored lights, lasers, and pulsing music spilling from most of them.

"It's always night here?" Taffyta asked as the car stopped and they got out.

"Nope, we have a full day/night cycle." He spread his arms out. "Welcome to  _Extreme EZ Living 2_! Pick your party."

"Wow," she said, still amazed by the way the beach stretched on forever.

A woman in a skimpy bikini walked by, pointed to Taffyta, and exclaimed, "Like!"

She furrowed her brow and looked down at herself, wondering what the woman was talking about. "Huh?" Then, out of nowhere, a gold coin spun through the air and attached itself to her shoulder.

"Oh, yeah, we're all about good times and liking stuff here," Malcolm said. "Collect enough of those and you can buy yourself something nice."

Reaching up, she touched the coin. It just stuck to her jacket, and she shrugged. "Cool, I guess."

Malcolm cocked a finger at her. "We say 'good' here, Blondie."

A group of people walked by at that moment, saying, "It's good!" "It's  _so_ good!" "It was like, so good that I feel really good now!"

She brushed her bangs out of her face. This place would do. She'd never been anywhere more unlike  _Sugar Rush_. Which made it perfect. "I want to go to that party," she said, pointing. She didn't even pick a specific one, she just jabbed her finger in the general direction of some of the swirling lights and pounding music.

On the way there, they walked by a pool that had a half-submerged police car sticking out of it, though that wasn't stopping anybody from swimming. The car's lights were still flashing. Taffyta collected a few more coins from people liking her. All of them shot her sparkling white smiles. By the time they reached the party, she was starting to feel as popular as she'd once been in  _Sugar Rush_.  _No, don't think about Sugar Rush_.

The two of them walked into the party and bass hit Taffyta in the chest like a Sweet Seeker. The room was dark, lit only by a disco ball, colored lights, and lasers that spun around and made her dizzy. Glancing to one side, she saw a couple making out, and she felt her face turn bright red as she looked away.

"Can I dance?" Taffyta asked Malcolm.

"Do what you want. You're here to do what makes you feel good."

She took a deep breath and threw herself into the heaving, sweaty crowd. They all seemed to be doing the same step over and over, but the music was so loud and the lights so hypnotic that she lost herself in the monotony.

The songs all blended together and she kept dancing for half an hour, an hour maybe, bumping into people around her. One of them, she realized, was Malcolm, and when she saw him, she asked, yelling to be heard over the pounding bass, "How did you know about me wanting to forget stuff?"

Malcolm grinned at her and pulled her aside. "People person," he said, sticking a thumb into his chest. Then, he dug around in his pocket. "Hey, Blondie, it's been real, but I got other scenes to hit up. Wanted to give you this before I split, though." He grabbed her hand and put something in her palm, then closed her fingers around it.

"What is it?" Taffyta asked, clutching her fingers around what felt like a cool, hard candy tube.

"Just a little something to change your life," he said with a wink. "You can thank me later."

She looked down at her clenched fist, then back up, but he was gone, vanished into the pulsating crowd. Leaning against the wall, she opened up her fingers. There was a vial there filled with a bright green powder. It reminded her of nothing so much as sour apple sand in the Food Coloring Painted Desert. What was it going to do?

She held it up to the light and shook it, not that the motion gave her any more insight. Laser light refracted through the glass. Well…Malcolm knew she was carrying around bad memories. Maybe it would erase them.

Would that mean she wouldn't remember where she came from? She fingered the coins she'd accumulated for her dancing and her outfit and—well, whatever it was that people liked about her here. No one wanted to leave her out in this game. She'd been accepted as she'd taken her first steps across the endless beach. That first coin was still on her shoulder, sparkling in the disco-ball lit room.

If she couldn't remember where she came from, she wouldn't have anything to miss. Not that she missed  _Sugar Rush_. Not at all. Nope, she didn't miss  _Sugar Rush_ , she didn't miss her cozy pink house in Strawberry Fields, she didn't miss Vanellope or Candlehead or Rancis. And she especially didn't miss King Candy.

She tilted the vial again, watching the powder spill from one end to the other. With any luck, she wouldn't ever.

Taffyta popped the vial open, staring up into the colored lights and disco ball, feeling the music vibrating through her code, and poured the green powder into her mouth.

She'd expected it to be sweet, but it had no taste. She'd also expected some kind of grand moment, like she'd be able to feel all her bad memories being wiped out of her. Maybe some sparkling, swirling lights to make her into a new person. But there was nothing like that, and she could remember everything as clearly as ever.

Then, the music got louder and slowed just as the light in the room became liquid. Taffyta blinked, tilting her head at the way the dancers' movements became like molasses, and yet filled with crystalline clarity. She could see every strand of hair swinging mid-gyration on the woman nearest to her, individual beads of sweat standing out on her forehead, and the dub bassline of the music wub-wubbed straight through her. It felt wrong.

_Taffyta sprawled on the floor of the throne room, tossing pieces of strawberry hard candy into her overturned helmet a few feet away. Most of the candy was littered around the helmet and every ten pieces or so, King Candy would tip it sideways with a finger to check how much candy was inside._

_"You have terrible aim," he commented, leaning back on his palms, his legs stuck out comically in front of him._

_Sticking her tongue out, she said, "Let's see you do better."_

_"Challenge accthepted!" he said grandly, scooping up a handful of candy from the floor. He made his first two shots and then missed three in a row._

_"Wow," Taffyta said. "Who has terrible aim now?"_

_He raised an eyebrow and flicked a piece of candy at her, which bounced off her forehead. "Hoohoohoo, you were sthaying?"_

_With a wicked grin, she threw the candy right back at him, but he dodged the projectile. "Oh, fine," she huffed. "So my hand-eye coordination's only good when I'm behind the wheel." With a smirk, she added, "Sorry I got you about a hundred times with Sweet Seekers today, by the way."_

_Tipping his crown forwards, he said, "Oho, that'sth justht about the leastht apologetic apology I've ever heard."_

_She giggled and popped a piece of candy into her mouth, and there was a moment of companionable silence between them. Then, pushing herself into a sitting position, she asked, "King Candy?"_

_"Yesth, Taffyta?"_

_"How come you never hang out with any of the other racers like this?"_

_He looked at her and smiled. "Becausthe I like you bestht. And you know it, my dear."_

_With another giggle, she said, "Yeah. I guess I do."_

She had time to think that this sure didn't feel like forgetting. What had been in that powder…? Then a hot burst of pain exploded in every byte of her body, her eyes rolled back into her head, and she toppled to the floor, unconscious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extreme EZ Living 2 was a fourth game that was going to be included in Wreck-It Ralph at one point. There's a 'deleted scene' that I drew from to write this chapter, plus the concept art in The Art of Wreck-It Ralph. I wasn't slavish about every detail, since it never got further than storyboarding. Skittles the uni-candy-corn is also an abandoned character from early in production.
> 
> 'Bits' would be more appropriate than 'bytes', if I understand the difference correctly, but I also didn't think it read as well, so I went with 'bytes'.
> 
> Finally, gotta give credit to Erin Oppel for Taffyta living in Strawberry Fields, since I read it in one of her fics and loved the name. Hope you don't mind me borrowing it!


	4. Chapter 4

The nausea hit Taffyta before she even realized she was awake.

She wretched, choking, before she felt hands grabbing at her.  She wanted them off—they were hurting her!—but they turned her onto her side, and her stomach heaved again and she was throwing up and choking and gasping and she couldn’t _breathe_ and what was happening to her?

“I told you,” an unfamiliar voice said.  “Bet you wish you’d listened and gotten a couple more buckets now, huh?”

“Shut up, you little twerp.”  Through the haze of her nausea and vomiting, Taffyta recognized this voice—Wreck-It Ralph.  “Why does he need to be here again?”

“He said he can help,” another voice said.  Fix-It Felix?  It was closer, and Taffyta thought his might be the hands comfortingly patting her shoulder as she gasped for air and threw up again.  At least it might have been comforting if the pressure from his palm wasn’t sending jolts of pain through her.

_What was happening?_

“ _Can_ you help?” a small, nervous voice asked.  Vanellope!

Taffyta struggled to open her eyes, wanting to look at her president and apologize for abandoning the game, even if no one missed her because she hadn’t been on the roster again, that was no excuse, she’d been selfish and immature and somehow, somehow this misery was her punishment for that.

Her vision was all light leaks and blurriness when she got her eyes open, and then another wave of nausea hit her and she doubled over again.  She could see now that someone was holding a bucket up for her.

No one had answered Vanellope’s question.  “Hey!” she said.  “Is she going to get better or what?”

There was silence and Taffyta clutched at the blanket she was on.  She was in bed.  Her bed?  No, even her house wasn’t this pink.  The castle, then?  But how had she gotten here?  She’d been—she’d been at the party in _Extreme EZ Living 2_.  The last thing she remembered…the last thing…she’d swallowed that powder that Malcolm had given her…

“This one’s for you,” Ralph growled.

“Oh,” said the voice she didn’t recognize.  “ _So_ sorry, didn’t you just tell me to shut up?”

“Yeah, well now I’m telling you to answer the President’s question!”

Taffyta tried to raise her head.  There was something familiar about the voice after all, as though she’d heard echoes of it somewhere else, but she couldn’t place it.  The streaks cleared from her vision but all she could see was the bucket, and as she lifted her gaze, a woman in some kind of body armor.  Taffyta recognized her—Felix’s wife?  She’d gone to their wedding…  Calhoun, that was it, from _Hero’s Duty_.

Calhoun smiled at her and said, “You’re doing great, soldier.”

Taffyta attempted to smile, but her gorge rose again and she had to flop over the bucket once more.

There was the distinctive sound of Vanellope’s glitchy teleportation, and then the feeling of someone beside her.  “Ralph?” Vanellope asked.  “Felix?”

There was a thumping sound, an “ _Ow!_ ” and then, the voice she didn’t recognize said grudgingly, “It depends on how badly her code’s corrupted.”

“That’s not a good answer,” Ralph said.

“Well, I’d think that the whole arcade would want me to turn over a new leaf, don’t you?  And you know, I thought I’d start by not lying.  I don’t want to _sugar-coat_ things, I guess you could say.”

Calhoun sniffed.  “I can take off some non-vital piece of his anatomy, if you want.”

“Yeah,” Ralph agreed.  “How about a foot?”

“Now, now!” Felix interrupted hastily—though Taffyta couldn’t help noticing the note of nervousness in his voice, as though he didn’t necessarily think this was an empty threat.  “Let’s all just calm down here.”

At least Taffyta hadn’t thrown up for over a minute, though roiling nausea still battered her.  She pushed herself up to try to get a better view of the room, noticing that Calhoun switched out, and then lifted a fresh bucket in sync with her movement.  Taffyta clenched her fists around the pink blanket and told herself she wouldn’t need the bucket again.  Anyway, now a weird, sharp pain that radiated from nowhere and everywhere was starting to overpower the nausea.  It wasn’t exactly an improvement.

With more effort than she thought she’d ever put into anything in her life, she forced her arms to take her weight, though they were like taffy, and flopped onto her back.  At least she could see something besides the bucket now.  Felix was indeed on one side of the bed.  One of his hands was lightly touching her shoulder, ready to support her if necessary.  Vanellope was crouched on the blanket at her feet, worried chewing on one her hoodie’s laces.  Ralph was standing off to the side, glowering, and Taffyta winced.  Couldn’t he have just a _little_ sympathy?

Then the fifth voice spoke up again.  “I _told_ you I’ll do what I can.  I’ve been _telling_ you that I’ll do what I can for days!  What more do you want?”

Taffyta searched for the owner of the voice, just as Ralph said, “Oh, I could start with knocking every single one of your yellow teeth out of that obnoxious smile of yours.”

And then she saw him.  She’d missed him because she had to look up to Ralph’s face, everyone in _Sugar Rush_ did, the guy was huge, and the figure in front of him, slouch-shouldered and staring at the ground, was unobtrusive in comparison.

All the air left Taffyta’s lungs, but she still said, “What’s _he_ doing here?”

There was a still, heavy silence in the room.

Then Turbo looked up at her, his glowing yellow eyes boring straight into her own, and she felt her chest tightening into a sob.

As if things weren’t bad _enough_.

“You have a real way with words there, Ralph,” Turbo sneered, looking away from Taffyta and back towards the ground.

And then he glitched.  Red binary obscured him for a second.  When it cleared, King Candy was standing there in the same slouched pose.

Okay.  So things could get even worse.

Taffyta shut her eyes and grit her teeth against the urge to vomit.  This time it wasn’t whatever was wrong with her, it was seeing _him_ there.  The man who’d meant everything to her.  The liar who’d used her.  The fraud that for the barest of traitorous seconds, she was overjoyed to see.

Her stomach heaved again, but nothing came out, and she just whimpered and let pain wash over her.

“I told you it was a bad idea to let him in here!” Ralph said.

Calhoun set the bucket down with a clunk and pulled out a huge gun, pointing it at King Candy.  “I’ll bring him back to the dungeon,” she growled.

King Candy rolled his eyes.  “It’sth the _fungeon_.  If you’re going to lock me down there indefinitely at leastht get it _right_.”  Calhoun slid something on the gun and the weapon clicked and started whining while a red dot appeared in the center of King Candy’s forehead.  He held up his hands, and Taffyta saw for the first time that his wrists were shackled with Lifesaver handcuffs.  “On the other hand, when you put it like _that_ ,” he said with a nervous chuckle.

Ralph yanked the door open so hard that crumbs flew off the frame, then shoved King Candy towards it.  Calhoun stuck the muzzle of her gun into the king’s back—no, that wasn’t right, he wasn’t the king, but wasn’t he dead?  Taffyta’s head spun.  Everything was so confusing and she’d never felt like this in her life, this wasn’t the mild stomach-in-her-throat motion sickness that she got when her kart slipped off the road and she free-fell, this was…this was something else, something really bad, and—and—

“What’s going on?” she whimpered, but if anyone answered her, she didn’t hear it.  Blackness rose up and swallowed her. 

 

* * *

 

The pain woke her up.  But at least the nausea was gone.

Taffyta rolled over onto her back and opened her eyes.  The ceiling was really, _really_ pink.  If she was in the castle, apparently the guest rooms hadn’t made the re-coloring cut that the throne room had been treated to.  There were big pink frosting scrolls in the corners, inlaid with pink candy buttons.  Even the walls were pink.

How long had she been asleep?  The room was quiet; everyone must have left.  Should she try to get up?  She wasn’t even sure her legs would support her.

“Good morning,” a voice said, making her jump.  The pain of the motion was crippling.  “Well,” the voice went on, either oblivious to her pain or ignoring it, “technically it’s afternoon.  Do you normally sleep this long?  I s’pose not.  Otherwise you never would have made it to any of the daily races.”

She took a deep breath, hoping it would make her feel better, and turned her head.  Turbo, the arcade’s boogeyman, was sitting on a cookie chair by the side of her bed, intently working on something that she couldn’t see.  Then, with that weird whirring, garbled sound that Vanellope made when she glitched, King Candy took his place.

“Get out,” she said, putting all her strength into making it as clear as Caro syrup that she’d never meant anything more in her entire life.

“Mmph, I’m afraid that’sth not possthible.”  He looked up at her, an eyebrow arched.  Like he hadn’t usurped the game and brainwashed all of them.  “You sthee, the only reasthon I’m not in the fungeon at the moment isth becausthe I’ve stho sthelflessthly agreed to cure you.”

_Cure_ her?  Now she remembered—Felix had said something about that, about Turbo saying he could help her, though of course she hadn’t known it was Turbo at the time.  But what could she be sick with that he could cure?

Then it hit her.  King Candy— _Turbo_ —was dead.  They’d all seen the video of him eaten by the Cy-Bug as he’d exited the Rainbow Ice Caves, and they’d all sat in rapt horror as Vanellope had re-told the story of how the racer had died in the boiling lava of Diet Cola Mountain.  So _what_ was he doing here?  How was it possible?  Everyone knew, if you died outside your game, you didn’t regenerate, and the impossibility of his presence drove her questions about her own situation from her mind.

“How are you not boiled bug guts right now?” she demanded.

“Long sthtory.”

She opened her mouth to repeat the question, then stopped.  If he wasn’t going to tell her, then she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of asking twice.  However he’d survived, she’d find out from Vanellope.  Assuming that Vanellope would tell her.  What had King Can—Turb—well, whatever he was called, said?  The only reason he wasn’t in the fungeon was because he was helping her?  So how long had he been _there_?  She almost opened her mouth to ask him, then remembered that whole not-giving-him-the-satisfaction-of-showing-interest-in-him thing.

For five or ten minutes, King Candy did…whatever he was doing silently, glitching back to Turbo in the middle of it.  She kept almost asking what was wrong with her, but something kept stopping her at the last second.

Turbo was a lot less scary when he wasn’t looking at her with those glowing yellow eyes.  Even though he _did_ remind her of something dead with that chalky gray-white skin.  No wonder the whole arcade was scared of him—he looked the part of a villain.  Though at the same time there was something…kind of normal about him.  That helmet with the big red T on it?  Totally dorky.  His white jumpsuit was just about the ugliest thing she’d ever seen, ill-fitting and sagging in all the wrong places—just like some of the grown-up gamers that came into the arcade.  And it was hard not to notice King Candy’s mannerisms in this…this…person.  The way he held his wrists or tilted his head; he even had the tip of his tongue stuck out in concentration.

It made something in her hurt, and she reminded herself that there _was_ no King Candy.  Just this creep from an unplugged 80s racing game.

What was he _doing_ , anyway?  And why was he in the room with her?  _Alone_?  Had he somehow taken over the game again?  But Ralph, Felix, and Calhoun had been here, surely he couldn’t get past _all_ of them?  So where were they?  Why had they left her unprotected in the company of this…this…of him?  She glanced towards the door.  It was open, but just a crack.

“Scared of me, aren’t you?” he asked, startling her again.  His voice was a weird mix of King Candy’s and a stranger’s.  Turbo’s lisp was less pronounced, and he had none of King Candy’s effusiveness.

She glared at him.  “Why wouldn’t I be scared of a maniac?”

Turbo chuckled.  “Wynchel and Duncan are outside.”  He narrowed his eyes at his lap and quickly tapped at whatever he had there.  “Nonono, that’s not—there.”  With a sigh, he looked back up at her.  “They’ll come back if you want them to, I’m sure.  You know, if you don’t want to be alone in the company of a _maniac._ ”

Taffyta swallowed but didn’t say anything.  He hadn’t made any move to hurt her—he seemed content just to sit there and work.  She pulled the covers up to her nose and watched him.

And then anger jabbed at her.  He’d taken over their _game_.  He’d tried to delete Vanellope’s code, and when that had failed, he’d ostracized her.  How dare he just—just _sit_ here like this, like this was still his castle?  Like he still belonged here?  Like he was anything but an outsider and a bad guy?

Pushing the covers back down just a little, she asked, trying to be brave, “Why did you take over our game?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Yeah, well…”  She pushed the covers further down.  “You didn’t have to take over.”

“Oh, didn’t I?”

Taffyta forgot a tiny bit of her fear.  “ _No_.  You could have…you could have _asked_ to be part of the game.  Vanellope—well, she’s like the nicest person in the _world_.  She would have said yes.”

“I’m sure.”  He flickered between Turbo and King Candy, settling on the latter, and rolled his eyes.  “ _Sthweet_ , under _sthanding_ Presthident von Schweetzth.  Yesth, I’m sure she’d have welcomed me with _open_ armsth.”  He still didn’t look up, but a smile twitched at his mouth.  “I’m sure you’ve noticthed her disthposthition towardsth me isthn’t asth sugary asth you might hope for.”

“Why would _I_ want her to be nice to you?” Taffyta snapped.  “You were horrible to her.  And you—you made the rest of us into…into _bullies_.  You made us be mean to her too, because it wasn’t enough that you were.”

King Candy stopped whatever he was doing and stared at his hands for a long moment.  Then he looked up, straight into her face.  His form glitched to Turbo for an instant, but then he was back.  Taffyta didn’t want to admit it, but every time he glitched, and she saw Turbo’s chalky, yellow-eyed face staring at her, the knot in her stomach hardened.  And then every time he returned to King Candy, familiar King Candy, it loosened.

She knew that was stupid.  They were the same person.  Only, one of them had been kind to her for fifteen years.  The other one—she didn’t know him, and she didn’t want to.

“ _I_ made you into bulliesth?” he asked.  He sounded genuinely shocked to hear her say such a thing.  “If I recall correctly—and I do—I told you to sthtay away from the glitch.”

“ _Vanellope_ ,” Taffyta said heatedly.

“What we call her isthn’t relevant to thisth disthcussion.”  He glitched back to Turbo and she shrank back, even though pain shot through her as she moved.  His expression stayed frozen in a yellow-eyed glare, but the shock that had been in his voice was there in his eyes, too, just faintly.  “And I hate to tell you this, but I didn’t have anything to do with how you treated the glitch.  You and your friends came up with that _all_ on your own.”

Deep down, in the weeks since the game’s reset, that painful knowledge had sat, bubbling and festering in her.  And Taffyta didn’t want to admit it.

“You told us she was a mistake!” she said, feeling tears prick at her eyes.  _Don’t be stupid._ Don’t _be a stupid crybaby._   Everyone already said she was, she didn’t need King Candy—Turbo—the monster who’d taken over their game and made her think he actually _cared_ about her which was enough to make anyone cry, wasn’t it?  And…and…  She swallowed and forced the tears back.  The point was, she wasn’t going to cry.  How had this conversation gotten so turned around?  How had he managed to turn _her_ into the bad guy?

“I told you that the glitch was dangerous,” Turbo said, like they were discussing the weather.  “That she couldn’t be allowed to race.  That if she did, she could get our game unplugged.”  He paused, tilted his head at her, then shrugged and went back to what he was doing.  “But I definitely didn’t tell you all to act like rotten little cavities and torment her all the time.”  He shrugged again.  “Sorry if the truth hurts.”

She opened and closed her mouth a few times, then said, “You were happy we were doing it.”

“Didn’t say I wasn’t.”  He fiddled with whatever he was holding, and a happy smile ghosted across his face.  She wondered why, but knew she’d never be able to bring herself to ask.  Then he stood up, his expression set into a glare again.  “Time’s up for today.  If they let me in the code vault, you might start feeling a little better.”

“What…?” Taffyta asked.

He held up some kind of tablet.  Unlike everything else in _Sugar Rush_ , it wasn’t made of candy.  Blue light pulsed around its edges, but the flat surface was blank.  The screen, if it had one, must have been turned away from her.  “I’m fixing your code,” he informed her, like it was obvious.

“What’s wrong with my code?” Taffyta asked, trying, and failing, to keep the fear out of her voice.

Turbo smiled, and not in an entirely nice way.  “I’ll tell you tomorrow.  Well, assuming this goes well.  That virus sure did a number on you.”

“Virus?” she repeated like an idiot.

Shifting the tablet-thing in his hands, he asked, his voiced tinged with surprise, “Didn’t they tell you _anything_?”

Taffyta just wanted to burrow into the pink sheets and cover herself with the fluffy carnation duvet.  She hadn’t thought anything could be worse than how she was feeling, and she’d just found something that was.  

Her code had been corrupted by a virus.  This could be the end of her life.  Worse than that, it could be the end of her _game_.  If she infected anyone else, if the corrupt code wasn’t contained…why had they even let her back into _Sugar Rush_?

Swallowing hard, she said, “I…I passed out.”

“Oh.”  For a second, he looked like he wanted to say something else, but then he shrugged.  “Well, I’m sure you can get some answers out of President von Glitch when she does the rounds.”  He glowered, then clutched the tablet closer to himself.  “See you tomorrow.”

Taffyta _wanted_ to say that she didn’t want to see him, but she stayed silent.  

Without looking back at her, Turbo pulled the door open and disappeared through it.  Wynchel stuck his head into the room and asked, “Everything okay, Miss Muttonfudge?”

She nodded, even though nothing could be further from the truth.  Nothing was okay—she had a virus, and the only person who could help her, apparently, was Turbo.

Leaving the game to forget him had just made him reappear in her life.  Taffyta pulled the blanket over her head and something that was half a laugh and half a sob escaped her.  Going Turbo had made Turbo himself appear.

Yeah, things were just about as far from okay as they could be.  But at least now they couldn’t get any worse.


	5. Chapter 5

She was flying through the Frosty Mountains faster than she’d ever gone before, plowing through ice cream drifts, sliding around corners, her tires spinning dangerously close to the edge of the road.  This was what she was meant to do!  This was what she _wanted_ to do every single day and her code sang with joy that she was out here.

Snow blew around her, growing thicker and thicker, until she could barely see the track.  But she didn’t care, she’d never felt more alive.  Even though, she realized, she was out here alone.  Hadn’t the other racers been with her?

The mountains had been looming in front of her and she should have entered the Rainbow Ice Caves by now, but she was still outside in the swirling, blinding snow.  Now the road was invisible, the whole world was solid white, and vertigo hit her.  Her stomach lurched, she didn’t know if she was falling off the side of the road or driving on it, until the steering wheel jerked in her hands and she lost control of her kart.

She screamed as the kart spun, sliding fast into white nothing.  She was going to wreck, she was going to destroy her kart and she herself was going to regenerate and she _hated_ the feeling of that—

And then something grabbed her, ripping her from her seat and lifting her up,  higher and higher into the air.  Her stomach dropped as she rocketed upwards, whatever was holding her pinching her arms tight against her sides and hurting her.

Then she was above the snow, above the clouds, and she could see all of _Sugar Rush_ spread out below her.  And then she looked down at the clawed, purple and red hand clutching her body.

Her throat closed up and she couldn’t make a sound, though a scream was fighting to tear its way out of her throat.  The claw lifted her and she came face to face with the worst thing that she’d ever seen.

It was a Cy-Bug—and it was King Candy.

King Candy’s head, atop a long, candy-necklace neck, stared at her with crazed, empty eyes, as his neon pink wings beat to keep them aloft.  Purple stripes zigzagged down his forehead and down his chin.  They looked like blood.

“Hello, my dear,” the thing said, opening its mouth to laugh and exposing two rows of jagged teeth.  “How nicthe to sthee you again!”

Sound exploded out of her.  “Leave me alone!” she screamed, hitting at the carapaced hand gripping her.

“Oh, but Taffyta,” the bug said, baring its fangs in her face.  “I can’t do that.  Don’t you realizthe?  You’re _justht like me_.”  Its jaw opened, unhinging, as its claws squeezed her tighter and brought her towards its gaping maw, until all she could see was a mouthful of razor teeth and King Candy’s crazed laughter was ringing in her ears—

With a gasp, Taffyta sat bolt upright in her bed, then doubled over as a scree of pain ripped through her.  She whimpered, her arms clutched around her midsection, and shivered, feeling sweat soaking her clothes.

A nightmare.  Just a nightmare.  She’d never had one before.  She never wanted to have one again.  Her sides ached with the phantom pain of those claws clutching her, and for a second she saw, as clear as the pink blanket covering her legs, the Cy-Bug’s eyes—King Candy’s eyes, with every bit of soul ripped out of them.

With a whimper, she squeezed her own eyes shut, but the image didn’t go away.  With a deep breath, she forced herself to start singing, “S-U-G-A-R, jump into your racing car, say _Sugar Rush_!”  Fifteen years and that song still cheered her up.  Or in this case, calmed her down, even though her voice came out small and hoarse.

She sat there, breathing shakily in and out, her singing tapering off into tuneless humming, until her heart stopped pounding against her chest.

The horrifying image of King Candy as a Cy-Bug flitted through her mind again, and she shuddered.  She was going to lose it if she just kept lying here.  And she was afraid that she’d fall asleep again and slip back into the nightmare.

She looked at the door.  Closed.  And she was alone.  What time was it?

Determined, she pushed the blanket and sheets off of her, though her muscles panged.  She needed some answers from someone besides Turbo, and she was going to scour the castle until she found someone to give them to her.

Taffyta swung her legs over the side of the bed and dropped down to the floor.

Where she promptly discovered that her legs wouldn’t support her weight.  With an, “ _Oof!_ ” her knees buckled and she fell flat on her face, tasting sugar as she banged her lip on the tile.

The door creaked open and a voice said, “Oh, my land!  Are you all right?”

The sugary taste of the tiles was giving way to blood, but she pushed herself upright—at least her arms still worked—and onto her knees.  Fix-It Felix crouched down next to her just as she said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

“You’re bleeding!” Felix exclaimed.  “Here, let me fix that for you, kiddo.”  He pulled out his hammer and she shied away, even though she knew it wasn’t going to hurt.  Holding a hand out, he said, “Oh, don’t worry, I do this to myself all the time.”

Taffyta relaxed.  There was something about Felix that put her at ease.  Of all of Vanellope’s out-of-game friends, he was the one who’d always been nicest to her.  “I’m not worried,” she said.  “Sorry, I’m just kind of jumpy.”  She opened her mouth to say she’d had a bad dream, but at the last second stopped.  Maybe she didn’t want other people to know about it.  Telling anyone that Turbo had said she was just like him, even if it _had_ only been a dream, didn’t seem like a good idea.

Smiling, Felix gently tapped his hammer against her lip.  There was a ringing sound, and then the stinging and taste of blood disappeared.  “Can’t you get rid of the virus that way?” she asked hopefully.

Felix looked regretful.  “I wish I could.  C’mon, you shouldn’t be sitting on the floor like this.”  As though she weighed nothing at all, he scooped her up and deposited her back on the bed.  She hadn’t realized until she was engulfed again in its pinkness that it was the very _last_ place she wanted to be.  “So Turbo told you about the virus, huh?”

“Sort of,” she said, glaring at the duvet.  It had smiley-faced strawberries on it, which endeared it to her a little.  Then, she looked back up at Felix, who was standing next to the bed, his hands on his hips.  “But I still don’t know what’s going on,” she said.  “I don’t get how this happened to me.  And—and how is King Ca—Turbo, I mean, alive?  Why’s he helping me?”

Felix looked somber, but he cracked a small smile for her benefit.  “Whoa, slow down!  I think Vanellope’s probably the best person to answer those last two questions—”  When Taffyta pouted, he added, “But let’s see what I can do about the first two, okay?”  Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he said, “Gosh, I guess the best place to start’s when we figured out you were missing.  Vanellope thought maybe you just needed some time alone but then when the arcade was about to open and you still weren’t back, well, she came barreling into _Fix-It Felix Jr._ on her go-kart.”

That sounded just like Vanellope.  Taffyta knew how much she cared about her friends and that she’d do anything to protect them.  She just hadn’t realized she qualified.

“We only had about fifteen minutes but Ralph knew to go straight to Tapper.  That’s how we figured out you’d gone over to _Extreme EZ Living 2_ , but none of us had time to look for you right then.  But then Tammy—”

“Who?” Taffyta asked.

Felix smiled goofily.  “Sergeant Calhoun, that is—she figured she could spare a couple of her men to go find you over there.  And, well, they did.  Eventually.”  He lowered his voice.  “I don’t like saying a bad word about anyone, but those Easy Living folks are _not_ very helpful, if the way Kohut tells it’s true.  Him and his men had to look all _over_ that game for you without any help from the locals.”

Taffyta stared at her lap.  She’d had no idea that people had gone through this kind of trouble for her.  “It wasn’t as fun over there as I thought it would be.”

He patted her shoulder, which made pain spider down her body to her feet.  “They found you, that’s the important thing.  And they could tell you were pretty sick, so they high-tailed it back to _Sugar Rush_.  Hey, how do you feel today?  Any better?”

Rubbing at her stomach, remembering the nausea and vomiting from yesterday, she said, “I guess so.”  She wondered again if she should mention the nightmare, but the thought of it made her heart clench in fear.  

“Great!” Felix said.  “Looks like Turbo’s sticking to his word after all.”

“You’re letting him change my code and you weren’t even totally sure he wasn’t _lying_ about helping me?” Taffyta asked.

Felix winced.  “Sorry, I’m being a dummy with my words.  I’m making all the changes in the code vault.  Turbo’s just telling me what to do.  He didn’t like _that_ very much…”  With a shrug, he added, “But I’d be able to tell if he was trying to pull the wool over our eyes and tinker with the game again.”

“Oh.”  Taffyta thought about that.  “Is that what that tablet thing is that he had yesterday?”

“Yessirree.  It’s a terminal, but we made sure it’s not linked up to the code.  He just inputs all the changes, and then I work off that.”

“Why can’t _you_ just fix my code?”

“I sure wish I could, Miss,” Felix said.  “I just don’t know my coding well enough.  Turbo, though—jiminy jaminy, he’s caused bucket-loads of trouble, but he sure knows his stuff.”

Taffyta wasn’t sure if this conversation was making her feel better or worse.  On one hand, Felix seemed pretty confident that Turbo could fix what was wrong with her—on the other, this was _Turbo_ they were talking about.  At least they weren’t letting him in the code vault.

Felix looked troubled, then said, “I know you’re not feeling good, and things would probably go faster if we just let him in there to do his thing.  But…”

“No, I get it,” Taffyta said.  “I don’t want Vanellope to let him in there.  He’s a…he’s a psycho.  And he totally doesn’t care about what he did.  Taking over the game and everything, trying to delete Vanellope…he’d do it all over again, I know he would.”  Feeling very selfless, she added, “Maybe it’s too dangerous even to let him work on my code.  You never know what he might try to do.”

Giving her a big smile, Felix said, “Shucks, no, we’ll get you fixed up.”  Then, he adjusted his hammer.  “Well, I need to get on my way—arcade’s about to open.  I just wanted to check on you before I left.”

“Oh.”  The news that she was going to be left alone hit harder than she’d thought it would.  “Oh, it’s morning?”  That meant Vanellope wouldn’t be able to come by all day, since she’d be racing.  She wondered who was on the roster for today.  “Okay, well…bye, I guess.  And thank you, thanks for…well, like, everything, I guess.”

Felix patted her on the shoulder and she tried not to flinch at how much it hurt.  “Sure thing, kiddo.  Hang in there, okay?”

Taffyta nodded and sank back down into the bed, wondering how she was possibly going to while away the long hours until the arcade closed.


	6. Chapter 6

Lying in bed sick was even worse and more boring than not racing.  At least when she wasn’t racing she was free to do what she wanted, whether it was working on her kart, watching the race from the stands (which of course she almost never did, after all, who wanted to just _watch_ ), racing on the unused tracks with anyone else not on the roster, or just exploring _Sugar Rush_.  Her and Minty had even gone to Game Central Station one day.  The place was a ghost town during the arcade’s opening hours, and depressing, too.  Pretty much the only other people out were homeless characters whose games had been unplugged.

Then again, when her two choices were between being along in her room, and being with Turbo in her room, she was pretty sure she preferred the former.  About halfway through the day, there was a knock on the door, which opened to reveal Wynchel and Duncan escorting a handcuffed and glitching King Candy.  She refused to make eye contact with him.

Her nightmare came back to her all over again and her heart starting pounding, and then she _did_ force herself to look up, out of sudden certainty that she’d see the Cy-Bug wearing King Candy’s face.  But it was just…King Candy, looking like he always did.  The least threatening person in the world.  Friendly, cheerful—even handcuffed, he was still pretty cheerful—and definitely not a Cy-Bug.

“You know, thesthe thingsth _really_ aren’t necthessthary,” he said to the police, raising his wrists and pointing with one finger towards the handcuffs.

“President von Schweetz says you wear them a week for every escape attempt,” Duncan said.  “So get used to ‘em.”

Scowling, King Candy said, “That wasthn’t an esthcape attempt, it wasth a…a…an exthpression of my code-given rightsth to— _ow_!”  He rubbed at his head where Duncan had just whacked him with his nightstick.  “That _hurt_!  Sthincthe when does thisth kingdom sthanction policthe brutality?!”

Duncan drew back his nightstick to hit King Candy again, and the racer glitched to Turbo and raised his hands awkwardly, twisting them in the handcuffs.  “Okay, okay.  Point taken.”  With exaggerated care, he tiptoed over to his chair and sat down, the terminal on his lap.

“We can stay if you want, Miss Muttonfudge,” Wynchel said.  “We thought he might be a little better behaved after two and a half months in the fungeon, but apparently we still have a dangerous criminal on our hands here.”

“Oh, you’re just getting back at me for making you get off your fat pastry behinds,” Turbo snapped.  “You never worked that hard for me, you couple of incompetents— _ouch_ , hey!”

This time, Duncan smacked him, apparently just for mouthing off.

Remembering the conversation she’d had with Turbo yesterday, Taffyta hesitated.  She didn’t want anybody to hear stuff like that, that she’d bullied Vanellope just because she was mean, and not because she’d been under some hacker spell to do so.  At least Wynchel and Duncan had just been following orders when they’d treated Vanellope bad.  “No, you don’t have to stay,” she said.  “I don’t think…”  She glanced at Turbo, wondering how true she believed her next words were.  “I don’t think he’s going to hurt me.”

“There’s one person with half a brain in this room, at least,” Turbo muttered, then ducked before Duncan could hit him again.

Duncan gave Turbo a beady look, but Wynchel shrugged and said, “Okay, Miss Muttonfudge.  But if you need us, we’ll be right outside.”

Then she was alone with Turbo again.  He settled into his chair, rubbing absently at his head under his helmet, and powered the terminal on.  Taffyta peered upside-down at the screen, but it all looked like gibberish to her.  Coding—just one more thing she hadn’t known about King Candy, when she’d thought she’d known him better than anyone in the game, except maybe Sour Bill.

In the silence, she could hear Wynchel and Duncan talking to each other in the hallway.  Birds were singing outside, too.  Someone must have cracked her window open, but she hadn’t noticed until now.  And, so quietly that she wasn’t convinced she was really hearing it, the chug of go-kart engines drifted in on the breeze.

“You met a guy named Malcolm, didn’t you?” Turbo asked her suddenly.

She had no idea why, but she hadn’t been expecting him to talk to her.  Stupid.  He’d been plenty chatty the day before.

Then his question registered.  “What?”  She sat up quickly, regretting it when pain spiked up her spine.  Wincing, she asked, “How did you know that?”

Turbo’s sulfur eyes met hers.  “I’ve been around this arcade for thirty years.  You think I don’t know every deadbeat bit of malware floating around?”  His fingers skittered over the terminal.  “I told you not to go to that ridiculous game.”

“I don’t have to take orders from you anymore,” she snapped.

“True.”  He grinned at her, and she looked away from his yellow teeth.  “But you have to admit, I was right about that one.”

She didn’t have to admit anything.  She was determined, today, to just not talk to him.  She didn’t care how he’d survived, she didn’t care how long he’d been in the fungeon.  She didn’t care about _him_.  With a sniff, she rolled on her side so that her back was to him.  There.  This way, she couldn’t even _see_ him.  That made it easier to pretend he wasn’t there at all.

But Turbo wasn’t going to cooperate with that.  “Are you feeling any better?” he asked.

She wasn’t going to break her silence.  Nope.  The thing to do was just to stay quiet.

“The reason I ask,” he said unconcernedly, “is because I sort of need to know what to do next to take care of all the damage that you managed to do to yourself.  You know, fix the nausea first, or the fact that you can’t walk?”

Sitting bolt upright and glaring at him, she demanded, “That _I_ did to myself?  I got _tricked_.  I got taken advantage of!”

That seemed to happen a lot.  She hadn’t realized she was such an easy mark.

He raised an eyebrow and smiled.  Why was it that Turbo’s smile looked so sinister?  “So, are you feeling better or not?”

Taffyta crossed her arms over her chest and slouched against the headboard.  “Yes.”

Red pixellated him and he glitched to King Candy.  “Good,” he said, in the same unconcerned tone.  Then he stopped working on the terminal for a second and leaned an elbow on it, staring at her.  She glared back at him.  His form flickered, and he sat back in his chair.  “I’m glad.”

“Yeah right,” she snapped.

He sniffed and looked back down at the terminal, starting to work again.  “Believe whatever you want,” he said.

“Oh, so nothing that you say ever, at all?  ‘Cause I totally already fell for that once and I’m not gonna do it again.”

King Candy giggled, though he didn’t sound very happy.  “No, pleasthe, don’t fall for my liesth again.  You know what they sthay, hoo-hoo, fool me oncthe, shame on you, fool me twicthe, shame on me.  Only, you know.”  He gestured.  “Other way around, in thisth casthe.”

She glared at him.  “You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“What, being despisthed and locked up for the restht of…well, forever?  I can think of more fun waysth to sthpend my time.”  He continued tapping away at the terminal.  “Counting cracksth in the ctheiling, watching paint dry…you know.”

“It’s your own fault,” Taffyta said.

“Well, technically it’sth the glitche’sth fault.  Her and that bumbling, foul-breathed oaf Wreck-It _Ralph_.  Thingsth were going really well here, don’t you think?  I mean there we were, all getting along, racthing every day…”  He trailed off and she didn’t respond, wondering if he was finished.  Then he glanced back up at her, one eyebrow arched.  “You were good, I wasth good—well we’re both sthtill good, but _you_ get to racthe and I…well, I guessth I covered that.”  At this, he looked wistful, and Taffyta remembered Turbo’s story—he’d wanted to race, that was why he’d taken over _RoadBlasters_.   That was why he’d taken over _Sugar Rush_.

She understood that feeling of desperation that made you feel like you’d do _anything_ if you could just get behind the wheel of your kart and compete.

He concentrated on the terminal for another minute, then he asked, “How’sth that going?”

“What?” she asked, before she remembered she wasn’t talking to him.

Looking back up at her, he said, “Racthing!  If I can’t do it, then I’d at leastht like to know you’re doing well againstht the glitch.”

“That’s none of your business,” she said, not wanting to tell him that as time had gone on, she’d raced less and less.  She wondered how much he knew about the game’s changes.  Did people go visit him in the fungeon?  Or was he just…down there alone all the time?

He looked disappointed.  What game was he playing?  There wasn’t any reason for him to pretend that he liked her anymore.  “Well, I wasth justht…hoo-hoo, curiousth.”

The laugh wasn’t convincing.  Against her will, Taffyta felt sort of…well, just a little, _tiny_ bit guilty.  _Just_ because of the thought of him all alone all the time; Taffyta wouldn’t want that for anyone, even an evil jerk who stole games from their rightful rulers.  Clearing her throat, she said, “Can I ask you something?”

“I’d be delighted.”

There was a jab of pain behind her eyes.  “Why would that Malcolm guy want to give me a virus?  He’s not trying to take over the game too, is he?”

He glitched back to Turbo.  “No.  Garbage like him just does it for fun.  He’s not even part of _Extreme EZ Living 2_ , did you know that?”

“How would I know that?”

“Well, now you do.”

Taffyta folded her hands in her lap, feeling even more stupid about what she’d done.  “So there wasn’t even any point?  I just looked like I’d be fun to mess with?”

“Yep.”

“Oh.”  She felt a lump in her throat.  Why had she been such an _idiot_?

Turbo leaned back in the chair and propped his feet up on the bed, which Taffyta stared at but didn’t comment on.  “Malcolm tried the same thing with me.  Well—”  He glitched to King Candy.  “—me like thisth.”  Glitching back—could he control it?—he said, “Had no idea who he was dealing with, of course.  So I wouldn’t take it personally.  _Everyone_ from _Sugar Rush_ looks like a sucker.”

“That’s because we _are_ ,” she muttered.  “We all fell for your little act.”

He looked at her from under his lowered eyebrows.  “You know,” Turbo said, “is it the _worst_ idea in the world that I was actually a pretty good king?”

“You weren’t to Vanellope.”

“That goes without saying.”  He shrugged, his eyes flicking back and forth as he worked on her code.  “I mean, sure, I locked your memories up, but you wouldn’t have _liked_ me if you’d known that I coded myself into the game as ruler instead of her.”

There wasn’t any good response to this.  They wouldn’t have _liked_ him?  Was he _crazy_?  She felt a wave of nausea and hoped she wasn’t going to throw up again.  There weren’t any buckets in the room.

“Guess what,” she said, even though it definitely didn’t qualify as a good response, “when you lie to people, and try to hurt them, and then you get caught?  That doesn’t make them like you, either.”

His eyes shifted towards her before returning to the terminal.  “Huh.”

She waited, then said, “Is that seriously all you have to say?”

Turbo shrugged.  “No.  I mean, it’s just—I guess this was pretty stupid of me, but I expected _you_ of all people to have a little…a little…I don’t know, understanding.  You wanna win, you want people to like you—you’re a lot like me.”

Her nightmare came back to her in stark, vivid clarity, the Cy-Bug wearing King Candy’s face hissing almost the same words at her.  “I’m not _anything_ like you!” she yelled, aiming a clumsy kick at his feet from under the blanket.

Shock, probably more than actual impact, made him rock back in his chair and plant his feet back on the floor.  Wynchel and Duncan burst into the room, brandishing their batons, and Turbo, glitching between his two personas, shrank back in his chair, his eyes narrowed to slits.  He looked like a cornered, feral animal.

“All right, Turbo, you asked for it,” Duncan said, slapping his nightstick against his palm.

Taffyta watched the two of them advance on Turbo, and then she said, “Wait—you guys, stop.”

The three men swiveled their heads to look at her, varying degrees of surprise on their faces.  Turbo looked the most surprised of all.

Swallowing, she said, “You don’t have to hit him.”

“But it’s fun,” Wynchel said, his brow furrowed.  “And we heard yelling.”

She glanced towards Turbo.  His eyes were round.  It made him look more human.

And then she realized.  She’d hurt his feelings.  She’d actually, honest to ice cream hurt his feelings.  “He didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.  Then, amending that, she added, “At least, not anything worth hitting him over.  Not right this second, anyway.”

The police officers looked doubtful, but they put away their batons.  Then Duncan said to Turbo, “Your time’s up for today anyway, freak.  Time to go back to your cozy cell downstairs.”

Turbo looked at Taffyta, then stood up.  His white skin looked even more pasty against the blood red of the Lifesaver handcuffs.  “Okay, I’m coming,” he said to the donuts, glaring when they poked him with their batons as he passed them.

Then he stopped in the door, braving their continued abuse, and said, “Hey, Taffyta.  About racing—I know you said it’s none of my business, but when you’re feeling better, and you’re out there again?  You should know that you have a fan in the fungeon.”  He jumped at a particularly enthusiastic poke from Wynchel.  “All _right,_ I’m _going_!” he snarled at the two of them, and allowed himself to be prodded out of the room.


	7. Chapter 7

The second time she had the nightmare, she knew what was going to happen as soon as the snow swirled in and blinded her.  Her kart spun out, no less terrifying.  _More_ terrifying, in fact, because she knew that she wouldn’t crash.  She knew that the Cy-Bug was coming for her and it did, its claws squeezing her even tighter this time.  Its eyes were even more dead, its laugh even more crazed, and the purple tracks like blood stood out livid against the sick paleness of its skin.

Taffyta tried to scream but the dream kept her throat paralyzed as the Cy-Bug closed its teeth around her—

Her own muffled yell woke her up and just like the last time, she laid there covered in sweat, her heart pounding and her breathing loud in her own ears.

“ _Seriously_?” she asked the empty room.  The virus had to be giving her nightmares.  That _had_ to be it.

Speaking of the virus—for the first time since her misadventure in _Extreme EZ Living 2_ , she wasn’t in pain.  The thought distracted her from the memory of the King Candy/Cy-Bug from her nightmare.  As a test, she held her arms up over her head.  No pain.  She kicked the pink blanket and sheets off.  Still no pain.

This was maybe about to be the best day of her life.  Well, second best day.  The best day would be when she was racing again.

Taffyta swung her legs over the edge of the bed and let them dangle.  _You can do this_.  Slowly, she lowered herself to the floor, planting her stockinged feet on the sugar cube tiles.  Taking a breath, she let go of the bed and allowed her legs to take her full weight.

They shook.  But they held.  And standing didn’t hurt.

She heaved a sigh of relief and was about to leave the room—more like a prison—when she looked down at herself and realized, for the first time, that she was in a nightgown.  One of Vanellope’s, from the look of it.  There was a closet in one corner of the room which she hadn’t taken any interest in during her stay.  Now, she padded over to it and pulled the door open.  Her dress and jacket were hanging inside and her shoes and hat were on the floor.  There was a mirror on the inside of the door.  Thank gumdrops for small blessings.

Without wasting any time, she got dressed.  Wearing her own clothes made her feel like herself again, like the virus hadn’t ever happened.  She settled her hat over her head, even though she had a feeling no one was going to let her out of the castle yet, let alone back onto the racetrack.  Then, she flipped her hair and shot her reflection a bright grin.  “Stay sweet!” she told herself, just because she felt out of practice.

Her grin faded to a determined look.  Time to get out of this room and feel like a human being again.

The bedroom door creaked as she pulled it open, and she peeked out into the hallway to make sure no one was guarding it.  Then, with a skip, she was free.

The castle was quiet and Taffyta was pretty sure she could hear go-kart engines in the distance outside, so it must have been daytime.  That meant she’d have the place to herself.  Something occurred to her.  If no one was around to stop her…then…why _not_ leave the castle?

With a smug smile, she started off down the hallway, intending to do exactly that, but something made her stop.

She didn’t know if she was better yet.  People had gone to a lot of trouble for her, going all the way to Litwak’s computer, hunting all over _Extreme EZ Living 2_ for her, and then taking care of her back in her own game.  She’d gotten herself into this mess in the first place by being selfish.  Maybe, this time, she wouldn’t be.

Sighing, Taffyta resigned herself to more boredom.  At least she had a bigger space to be bored in now.

She knew the castle pretty well, considering she didn’t live there.  Wandering its hallways by herself wasn’t just boring, though—it was lonely.  She had a lot of memories in this place.  Good ones.

That thought hurt, as usual.  But for the first time, it didn’t hurt as much.  She remembered what Turbo had said to her as Wynchel and Duncan had led him away yesterday—about him rooting for her when she raced again.  At first she hadn’t believed him—obviously!—but the more she’d sat there, alone with her own thoughts, the more she…well, had.  And now she wondered if maybe, just maybe, their friendship hadn’t been a complete sham.

Not that she forgave him for anything.  But…still.

Her wanderings brought her to a junction in the hallways.  The throne room doors, ornate with frosting scrollwork, were ahead of her, and to one side was a wide staircase.  A sign was posted on the wall next to it.

“‘To kart garage’?” Taffyta read off the sign, taking a few steps forward to peer down the staircase.  She’d never seen the castle’s garage.

Glancing over her shoulder, she hopped down onto the first step.  Vanellope wouldn’t mind if she just took a quick look.  Anyway, it wasn’t like the president’s kart would be down there, she was still out racing.  This didn’t qualify as being selfish, did it?  This was just…curiosity!  Yeah.  Before she could decide otherwise, she tiptoed down the stairs.

They wound in a loose, shallow-stepped spiral down two floors.  When she reached the bottom of the staircase, she pushed open the wide double doors there and slipped inside.

“Whoa,” she whispered.

The doors opened onto a cavernous room, lit with windows set high in the wall.  Sparkling white sugar arches spanned the garage, separating each kart into its own space.  Because there wasn’t just one kart in the castle garage—there were ten or more, each one a different shape.  Vanellope had her pick of different speeds, different handling, different acceleration, different weights, and Taffyta had no doubt that all the karts there were the best in their class.

She approached one made of peppermint hard candy, sleek and streamlined, and ran her hand over it.  She’d love to take a couple of these for a test drive, though she knew she’d always come back to Pink Lightning.  Your kart was more than just, well, a _kart._   It was special.  It was _part_ of you.  You won races together.  Your kart was like…like your partner.  Taffyta wasn’t surprised that Vanellope ignored every single one of these to race in the one that she’d made with Ralph.

Still, if Taffyta was president, she’d definitely have taken all of these for a spin or two.  Pink Lightning wouldn’t get too jealous.

Turning around with a smile on her face, her eyes fell on a kart she was all too familiar with.  Glittering white in the light shining in through the windows, the Royal Racer looked exactly the same as it always had.  She walked towards it and touched it lightly.  She’d thought—well, she didn’t know what she’d thought.  Not that she’d ever see this kart again.

_“Hop on,” King Candy said, patting the top of his seatback where the arm cut back towards the center._

_“What?” Taffyta laughed.  “No way!”_

_Leaning an arm on his kart’s door, he said, “Do you want to sthee my shortcut or not?”_

_Taffyta crossed her arms over her chest.  “I’ll drive myself, thank-you-very-much, Your Majesty.”_

_“Then I’m not showing you.”_

_“What?!”  She took her lollipop out of her mouth and stamped a foot.  “That’s not fair!”_

_King Candy giggled.  “Of coursthe it’sth fair, I’m the king!”_

_“I don’t think that’s how it works.”_

_“Well.”  He raised a smug eyebrow at her.  “That’sth the benefit of being king.  Whatever I sthay isth_ exthactly _how it worksth.”_

_Rolling her eyes, she asked, “Are you really going to make me ride on the back of your kart like an NPC?”_

_He bounced out of the kart and over to her, then put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her over to the Royal Racer.  “Would it help if I told you it’sth becausthe I know you don’t like falling?  I justht want you to sthee it oncthe before you try it yoursthelf.”  Pausing to smile crookedly at her, he added, “And I won’t tell anyone.”_

_“Falling?”  That changed things.  She_ hated _falling, that sick moment where gravity grabbed you and all you could do was wait for one of the marshmallow cameramen to grab you and set you back on the track.  “Yeah,” she said, still not thrilled with the idea of riding on another racer’s kart, even if it_ was _the king’s.  “That helps.”  She narrowed her eyes at him.  “And you have to_ promise _not to tell anyone.”_

_Holding up two fingers, he said, “Sthcout’sth honor.”_

_She clambered onto the back of the seat and settled herself in, her legs hanging next to his head once he’d seated himself.  “But,” she said, feeling a twist of nervousness, “what if I fall from here?”_

_“Pleasthe, I’m_ way _too good for that to happen,” King Candy said.  He swiveled to look at her, opened his mouth, but then turned back around without speaking.  Starting the kart so that the engine roared, he muttered something to the steering wheel._

_Taffyta didn’t think she was supposed to hear.  But it sounded like, “Plusth, I’d never let it.”_

A voice startled her out of the memory.  “Hey, Taffyta!  You must be feeling better if you’re snooping around the castle!”

Taffyta whirled around to find Vanellope standing behind her, her arms crossed over her chest and a smirk on her face.  “I wasn’t snooping!  The…uh, door was open!  And I thought I heard…well, a noise, yeah, so…”  She trailed off as Vanellope’s smirk only deepened.  “Okay, fine.  I was snooping.”

“That’s okay!” Vanellope said.  “Pretty cool down here, huh?”  Her eyes flicked towards the kart that Taffyta was standing next to, but she didn’t comment.

“It’s amazing,” Taffyta said, grateful that she wasn’t in trouble.  “I didn’t know you had all these!  You’re not mad at me for coming down here, are you?”

“Naw!” Vanellope said.  “It’s pretty tough to be mad at Typhoid Mary.  Plus you’re not puking anymore so _that’s_ a good note.”

Taffyta gave her leader a sweet smile.  She’d been waiting two days for this.  “Okay.  Well, then, Miss President, let me ask you something.”  She took a deep breath and demanded,  “ _Why_ didn’t you tell anybody that King Candy _was still alive_?!”

Vanellope’s cheerful expression vanished and she started twisting one of her hoodie’s laces around her finger.  Ignoring the question entirely, she said, “I pretty much just call him Turbo.  Or Turbutt.  Or—”

“Yeah, not really the point,” Taffyta said.  Pain flashed across her forehead, the first indication that she wasn’t better.  “He _took over our game for fifteen years_ , he tried to _kill_ you, and anyway, you said he turned into a Cy-Bug and died in Diet Cola Mountain!”

“Well…”  Vanellope said, “he did, _technically_.  I think so anyway.  But then he showed up again.  And I told people!  Just…not anyone here.  Except Sour Bill and Wynchel and Duncan, I mean, it would’ve been pretty hard to keep it a secret from them.  C’mon, Taffyta!” she said in response to the look Taffyta was shooting at her.  “It just would’ve scared everyone!  I told Ralph and Felix and Calhoun because I thought they’d know what to do.”

“Did they?”

“They had a lot of pretty cool ideas.  Not really E rated game _appropriate_ ideas, but I don’t think they were planning on the gamers seeing it…”

Taffyta could imagine that Ralph and Calhoun would have some pretty colorful ways to deal with Turbo.  “But you just locked him up in the fungeon?” she asked, finding herself hoping that Vanellope had vetoed any…er…non-E rated ideas.

With a shrug, Vanellope said, “Yeah.  I tried the execution joke on him.  He didn’t laugh.  And I always thought he appreciated a good joke, what gives?”

Taffyta thought about telling her that the execution joke hadn’t been a very good one but decided not to.  “So c’mon.  If I’m the only person here besides Sour Bill and Wynchel and Duncan to know he’s alive, you should pretty much tell me everything.”

Vanellope groaned and swung her arms at her sides, rolling her eyes back into her head until only their whites showed.  “Ugh, fine, I’ll tell you the Terrible Tale of Turbo.  Hey!”  She cocked her head and grinned.  “That was pretty good!”  Taffyta cleared her throat, and Vanellope stuck out her tongue, then hopped up onto the nearest kart and crossed her legs.  “It’s pretty boring, actually.  Me and Ralph found him wandering around the castle prob’ly…I dunno, maybe two weeks after he died.  A couple days after Felix and the Sarge’s wedding.”

“He’s been in the fungeon for _three months_?” Taffyta yelled.

“I guess so.  Wow, time flies!”

“Doing _what_?”

Vanellope’s expression grew serious.  “Not racing.  And being ignored.”

Two things that were probably just as bad as execution to him.  Now he’d know how Vanellope had felt for fifteen years.

Picking at her shoelaces, Vanellope added, “We kept him in the glitch-proof chains at first.  You probably noticed the glitching?”

“Kind of hard not to notice it.  But,” Taffyta added, “he doesn’t glitch like you do.  He can’t teleport.”

“Yeah, Felix noticed that actually.  So I said Turbo didn’t have to wear the chains, and he could have a nicer cell.”  She wrinkled her nose.  “But do you think he said thank you?”

Taffyta doubted it, from what she’d seen of Turbo’s feelings for Vanellope.

“That’s a big, _fat_ no,” Vanellope said.  “ _Plus_ , he won’t say how he survived, or regenerated, or whatever he did.  And Felix doesn’t know enough about code to tell what’s going on in the code vault.”

Taffyta’s head hurt again, but it also felt like something was banging on a door in her mind, trying to get her attention.  “He won’t tell you how he survived…” she muttered to herself.  Then she looked up at Vanellope, her eyes wide.  “Pixie sticks, Vanellope, he was a _racer_.”

“Yeah, I know,” Vanellope said darkly.  “He stole my kart.  Not that I want it back.  Keep thinking I should junk it actually…”

Taffyta put a hand to her head.  Why hadn’t she thought…?  “How do I get down to the fungeon?”

Furrowing her brow at Taffyta, Vanellope asked, “The fungeon?  Why do you want to go to the fungeon?”

“Um, just to hang out, it seems like a totally awesome place,” Taffyta said, smirking at the president.

“Hardy har-har.”  Vanellope popped to her feet, bouncing from the hood of the kart to the floor.  “You don’t want to see Turbutt down there, do you?”

Taffyta zipped her jacket up to her chin.  “As a matter of fact, Pres, I do.”

Eyebrows raised, Vanellope said, “Gee, Taffyta, you’re a real barrel of gummy monkeys.  What else do you do for fun?”

The words hit a nerve.  Even though it had been a joke, and Taffyta _knew_ it had been a joke, she still froze.  _Well, once upon a time I bullied someone who was just a little different from me…_ Her shoulders drooped.  “Vanellope, I owe you an apology.”

“Huh?” the president asked.  “For wanting to see Old Yellow Eyes downstairs?  Nah, I was just kidding, you can see him, I’ll just send Wynchel and Duncan—”

“No, not for that.”  She shook her head.  “And I don’t need Wynchel and Duncan.  No, I mean…I was just thinking about the way I treated you.  You know, back when…”  She took a deep breath.  _Just say it_.  “Back when King Candy was ruling the game.  I let him take the blame for how I acted.  People said we were brainwashed, and I…I went along with that.”  She should have admitted this to herself, and to Vanellope, without Turbo’s prompting.  But maybe some good could come of his nastiness.  Looking at the ground, she said, “That was easier than admitting that I can be really awful.  And mean.  Because that’s what I was.  All on my own.  No one made me do it.  And I just…”  Meeting Vanellope’s eyes, she finished, “I just want you to know how sorry I am.  Here I am, all sick and disgusting and you’re sticking by me, even after everything I did.”

Vanellope blinked.  Then she stuck her hands in her pockets and grinned.  “Well, hey, that’s why I’m president, I guess.  Because I’m totally merciful and forgiving and just all around great.”

Taffyta smiled.  “You’re a good friend.”

Returning the smile shyly, Vanellope said, “So are you, Taffyta.”  Then, she blew a raspberry, waved her hands, and said, “C’mon, pal, this calls for a hug.”

Taffyta laughed and the two girls embraced.

She’d left _Sugar Rush_ hoping things were going to get better—which had been stupid.  _Really_ stupid.  But the weird thing was, somehow, despite all the things that were even _more_ wrong, at least things between her and Vanellope felt right.


	8. Chapter 8

The fungeon corridor was long, dark, and really not very fun at all.

Taffyta stood at one end of it—the well-lit end, where the stairs were right behind her and she could turn around and run back up them if she wanted to.  Vanellope and Felix had both been kept down here.  Vanellope more than once.  The thought made her sick.  And the fact that the man who’d imprisoned her friends was now locked up himself didn’t make her feel any better.

Smoothing her dress over her legs, she marched down the hallway, ignoring the creepy painted animals on the walls and the exhortations to enjoy one’s stay.  The doors she walked by were open, and at least the cells had windows, so they weren’t so dark.

At the end of the hall was the one closed door in the fungeon.  Taffyta stared at it and reached into her jacket pocket, finding an uneaten lollipop.  She stuck the lollipop in her mouth, then set her shoulders and approached the door.  When she peered through the barred window, her eyes fell on Turbo, who was lying on a strawberry wafer bed.  The racer was staring at the ceiling, his hands folded across his stomach and his knees drawn up.  His handcuffs had been removed.  He didn’t seem to know she was there.

Taffyta wrapped her fingers around the bars and didn’t bother to wait for him to notice her before she spoke.  “You’ve always been able to regenerate in _Sugar Rush_ ,” she said.  “Haven’t you?  You’re good, but you’re not _that_ good.  You’ve been regenerating all these years.”  Turbo looked at her from the bed.  If he was surprised to see her, or by what she was saying, he didn’t show it.  Emboldened by his lack of reaction, Taffyta pressed on, “You’re part of this game, aren’t you?  You actually managed to _code yourself_ into this game.”  

Of course, she’d taken his ability to regenerate for granted before _Sugar Rush’s_ reset—but since then, she’d grown so used to thinking of him as a foreign _thing,_ a virus, that the idea now seemed incredible.

Turbo kept staring at her, dissolved into red binary, then solidified again.  “Nice of you to take an interest in me,” he said.

“How did you do it?” she asked, clutching at the bars.

He sat up, swinging his legs to the floor.  “Gonna go tell the glitch all about it, huh?”

“ _Vanellope_ ,” Taffyta said.  “Anyway, you’re a glitch now, so I wouldn’t go around calling people names.”

Crossing his arms over his chest, he said, “I’m not a glitch.  I just have a minor identity crisis.”  As if to punctuate the point, he glitched to King Candy.  “There’sth a differencthe.”  Uncrossing his arms, he rested his wrists on his legs and laced his fingers loosely together.  “In casthe you’re wondering, yesth, I’m sthaying I can leave thisth game whenever I want.”

“I wasn’t wondering.”

“Of coursthe you were.”

So maybe the thought had popped into her head.  She didn’t believe him, anyway.  He was a liar.  “Well, it doesn’t really matter, because you’re stuck down here.”  Unless, she thought, he managed to escape, which from the sounds of things, he’d tried to do more than once.  Shaking herself, she asked, “Anyway, how do you know you can leave the game?  Did you try?”

King Candy raised an eyebrow.  “What wasth it that the glitch usthed to sthay?  She could _feel_ it in her _code_?”

“Her name is _Vanellope_ ,” Taffyta snarled, ripping the lollipop out of her mouth and letting it fall to the floor.

He shrugged, unfazed by her aggression.  Glitching back to Turbo, he said, “But yeah, you’re right, by the way.  Of course I’ve been regenerating.  Have you ever been _hit_ by one of those gumballs in the Gorge?  Ouch.”  He rubbed at his neck with a wince, then looked at her, like he expected an answer.

Before the game’s reset, she would have smirked and said ‘no’, and they would have bantered, because of course she had been, and yes they were friendly rivals but over the years things had been much more on the friendly end of that, and…why, _why_ couldn’t it have been real?

But when she didn’t answer, Turbo shrugged and said, “As for how I did it—hey, I’m just that good.  I should’ve won a trophy for the coding I did on myself in _Sugar Rush_.  I mean, I impress myself all the time, but this is some _really_ impressive stuff.  Do you have any idea how hard it was not to _tell_ anyone what a turbo-tastic job I did for _fifteen years_?”

She rolled her eyes.  Back when she’d thought he was just King Candy, his confidence had been endearing.  And well deserved.  Now it was just off-putting arrogance.  “Bad guys don’t win trophies,” she said.  “Especially not for being jerks.  And stealing games from people.”

“I’m a good guy,” he said.

Taffyta stared at him.  “Do you actually believe that?”

Turbo smiled slightly.  “Hey, no one ever said good guys have to be good _guys_ all the time.”

Glaring, wondering what she’d really expected, she said, “Well guess what, I _am_ gonna tell _President_ von Schweetz that you’re part of the game.”  She took a step back from the door.  “And maybe she’ll try to delete _your_ code.  How would you like _that_?”

He glitched to King Candy, flicked his wrist, and grinned.  “Oh, I sthimply _love_ irony, hoo-hoo.”

Her eyes filled with tears and she didn’t even know why, except that he was too much for her.  Whirling, she began to stomp away, when there was a jingle from the cell, a glitching sound, and then Turbo’s voice.  “Wait—Taffyta.  Hold on a second.”  Her stride faltered but then she forced herself to keep going, until he said, “Please?”

Then she stopped and turned around.  Turbo was at the door, holding something out between the bars.  “You can give this to Felix, if you want,” he said.  ‘This’ was the terminal, but when she didn’t move forward to take it, he said, “It’s the last changes to your code.  The virus should be taken care of after this.  Then you don’t have to deal with me anymore.”  She still didn’t move, and he kept talking.  He always _had_ liked the sound of his own voice.  “After I upset you yesterday, the _glitch_ thought it’d be better if I finished this up in solitary.”

She marched forward and snatched the terminal from him.  “You better not be expecting me to say that you didn’t upset me.”

He took a step back and raised his hands.  “Nope.  Anyway, I don’t have to fish for compliments.”  Plopping back down on the bed, he added thoughtfully, “Maybe I’d better get in the habit…”

For a second, she stared at him, and then she turned, without saying another word, and fled the fungeon.

 

* * *

 

Taffyta trudged up the long spiral staircase to the castle’s main floor, holding the terminal tightly and wondering where she’d find Vanellope or Felix.  Maybe she’d be able to go home tonight.  If she wasn’t sick anymore—if Turbo was telling the truth—then yeah, after Felix did…whatever he had to do in the code vault, there was no reason she had to stay here.  Yeah.  Definitely.

Feeling better, she turned towards the throne room, her steps much lighter.  Then she heard voices coming from the other side of the door and froze.  Should she go in, anyway?  Or was this, like, a private conversation that she wasn’t supposed to hear?

She hesitated, then continued towards the doors.  Even before she was close enough to make out the conversation, she could tell that Vanellope, Ralph, Felix, and Sergeant Calhoun were in there.  And that, she was positive, meant that they were having a discussion that she wasn’t invited to.  But the throne room doors were cracked open, and Taffyta tiptoed up to them and stood still to listen.

“—eventually gonna find a way out of there, kid,” Ralph was saying.  “If there’s one thing we know he’s good at, it’s surviving.”

“Wreck-It’s right,” Calhoun said.  “You need a solution, President.”

“What’s wrong with the solution I have?” Vanellope asked.

Calhoun’s body armor creaked.  “It’s not long-term.”

“How about I put his name on the door of his cell?  Then it’d be like, his forever.  Pretty long term, don’t you think?”

“I’ll rephrase that.  You need a _permanent_ solution.  You’re just taking risks keeping him around.”

“If he wasn’t here, there wouldn’t have been anyone to help Taffyta.”

There was a silence.  Taffyta couldn’t help feeling that Calhoun maybe felt she would have been an acceptable loss.

Calhoun spoke again.  “All right.  But once he deletes the virus out of Muttonfudge’s code, we don’t need to keep him here.  He’s a liability, Vanellope.”

There was a silence, and then Vanellope said, “Wait, are you saying…?”

Felix spoke up then.  “I don’t like that idea.”

“There aren’t actually any ideas on the table,” Calhoun pointed out.  “But if there _were_ —”

“Hey, if you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, there’s one pretty major problem,” Ralph said.  “We don’t even know why he didn’t bite the dust in _this_ game.”

“Hey!” Vanellope said.  “I don’t wanna kill him, okay?  I—”

Taffyta couldn’t help it.  She gasped.  Loudly.

“Freeze, civilians!” Calhoun barked.  There was the sound of her drawing her gun and then rapid footsteps.  Taffyta had time to realize they were headed in her direction about a second before the doors were thrown open and she found a rifle aimed directly at her face.

With a scream, she threw herself to the floor, covering her head with her hands.  “I’m sorry, I-didn’t-mean-to-listen-I-was-just-walking-by-and-I’m-sorry-please-don’t-shoot-me!” she wailed in one breath.

Calhoun holstered her weapon, and when Taffyta peeked out from between her fingers, she found that there was a hand being offered to her.  “Well, glad to see _you_ up and about.”

Taking Calhoun’s hand and scrambling to her feet, Taffyta thrust the terminal towards the woman.  “Here.  Um—this is for Felix.  Turbo…I mean…it’s, um, well he told me—in the fungeon, that is, he’s still in the fungeon, hasn’t escaped or anything, nope—”

There was a glitching sound, and then Vanellope appeared at Calhoun’s side.  “Oh, hey Taffyta!  Turbo wasn’t too mean to you down there, was he?”

Taffyta opened her mouth, ready to say that Turbo clearly had a personality disorder that made him incapable of being really _nice_ to anyone, but then she remembered that she’d just heard a discussion about killing him.  And that was something that she didn’t want to happen.  “No, he was…he was okay.  I mean, I don’t think he likes the fungeon very much…”

“Yeah, he lets us know every chance he gets,” Ralph said.

Felix joined them and, taking the terminal from Calhoun, said, “San-fantastic!  I’ll hop into the code vault right away!  Tammy, do you mind helping me with the tether?”

The two of them hurried off and Taffyta leaned to one side to watch them go behind the throne and underneath the curtain there.  _That_ was the code vault?  Right back there?  She had _seen_ King Candy come out from back there and thought nothing of it.  Though _he_ hadn’t seemed all that pleased to see her on that occasion, now that she was remembering…  Huh.  As though she’d ever have suspected anything.

“So,” Ralph said, making her jump.  “What were you doing in the fungeon?”

The look he was giving her was distinctly devoid of trust.  She shrank back in nervousness, then straightened up.  She hadn’t been doing anything wrong, and she wasn’t going to act like she _had_ been.  “I went down there to ask Turbo why he’s still alive.”

Ralph folded his arms over his chest.  “Oh, you figured since you’re such a little charming princess, he’d tell you when he didn’t tell the rest of us, huh?”

She planted her hands on her hips.  That wasn’t fair!  She _got_ that Ralph didn’t like her because of the way she’d treated Vanellope, and maybe she deserved it.  But things were different now.  She was _loyal_ to Vanellope—they were friends.  Maybe even good friends.

Though she _did_ think she was pretty charming.  “I guess I had one advantage over _you_ ,” she said, “which is that I’ve actually _raced_ with him.  And hit him with Sweet Seekers and seen him get blown off the track or crushed by gigantic gumballs.”  She twirled to face Vanellope.  “He’s in the _code_ , Vanellope.  This is his game.  He can regenerate here.”

Vanellope didn’t say anything, but blue binary rippled across her.  Ralph stomped back into Taffyta’s field of vision.  “Did he tell you that?” the wrecker demanded.

“I asked him,” Taffyta replied coolly, “and he told me.  Yeah.”

That made Vanellope exchange a significant glance with Ralph, and Taffyta asked, “What?  What was that?”

“Oh, nothing,” Vanellope said, in a way that made it really obvious that it was the opposite of nothing.

“Kid,” Ralph said.  “Just because he told her something that he wouldn’t tell the rest of us…”

Taffyta crossed her arms over her chest and looked between the two of them.  “What’s going on here?”  Suddenly, a weird, tingly feeling jolted through her, and she gasped and put a hand over her heart.  When she noticed Ralph and Vanellope staring at her, she looked down at herself.

She was flickering blue, zeroes and ones rolling in waves across her body.  She was _glitching_.  “What—?”

Then, as abruptly as the glitching had begun, it stopped.  “Whoa,” Vanellope said.  “I like that look on you, Taffyta.”

“Sorry about that!” came Felix’s voice faintly from the direction of the code vault

Taffyta glanced in that direction and then back to Vanellope, shuddering.  “I don’t.”  The feeling had been creepy, just as bad as the one time she’d glitched through contact with Vanellope.  Definitely nothing she wanted to experience ever again.  “I’m glad everything’s going to be fixed after today.”  She made a face, then returned to the question at hand, which if Vanellope thought she’d forgotten, she was about to get a lesson in the Taffyta Muttonfudge School of Getting to the Bottom of Things.  “You two,” she said, pointing at Ralph and Vanellope, “are acting like I’m part of some kind of…of _scheme_.”

Ralph crossed his arms over his chest and gave Vanellope a look that said, clearly, ‘I told you so’.  Vanellope cleared her throat and replied, “It’s not a scheme.  I just…might’ve let you be under the impression that Turbo had to be in the same room with you to work on your code.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah, I was kinda hoping he’d chill out a little.  ‘Cause I mean, when he heard you were sick, that was the first time I saw him get worked up over anything except himself.”

“How did he even hear I was sick?  You said you were keeping him in the fungeon alone!”

Vanellope rolled her eyes.  “Wynchel and Duncan let it slip while they were down there.  And then he wouldn’t leave Sour Bill alone—I mean like, seriously, he didn’t have to throw his _entire_ plate of food at the little guy, you know?  So finally I went down there to talk to him, and you weren’t getting any better so that was when I decided to let him work on the code.  And then, since he was acting like a human being for once when it came to you…”

“This one had the brilliant idea to let him _out_ of the fungeon and into your room,” Ralph supplied.  “Unsupervised.”

“Yeah, and I was _right_ , he’s buttloads nicer to her than he is to anyone else!” Vanellope said.  “Bet he hasn’t called her a mean name _once._ ”

“Wait a second!” Taffyta said, louder than she’d meant to.  At least it got their attention.  “So I’m some kind of, like, Turbo rehabilitation program?”  She supposed she could have felt used about that, but it was so baffling—why would Vanellope _want_ to do anything but keep him locked up forever?  Especially when her friends wanted to kill him?

“Rehabilitation’s an awfully strong word,” Ralph snorted.  “I keep saying, kid, he’s never gonna be anything more than a menace, and he hates everyone—including you.  _Especially_ you.”

“He doesn’t hate Taffyta,” Vanellope said stubbornly.  “Anyway, something Felix said made me think.”  When Taffyta looked at her questioningly, she went on, “He told me that before Turbo took over _RoadBlasters_ , well, he wasn’t like the _greatest_ guy to hang out with, because he’s always been so full of himself, but he wasn’t the _worst_ guy, either.”

“Wow,” Taffyta deadpanned.  “Those are some really compelling words.”

“I just thought…if _that_ guy’s still in there somewhere, then it’s worth giving him a chance to not be a psycho, game-stealing jerk.”

Ralph shook his head.  “Look, I’m all for giving people second chances.”  He hesitated, glanced at Taffyta, and sighed.  “Even if I don’t do the greatest job of showing it all the time.”  That made Taffyta look at him in surprise, and he offered her a small, sheepish smile, which she returned.  “But I really think Turbo’s gonna spend the rest of his life trying to take this game back.  And if he can’t get this one, he’s just gonna game jump, and he might be smart enough about it that he’s not easy to catch.  What if he doesn’t create a new character?  What if he just _overwrites_ an existing character?”  He crossed his arms over his chest.  “Those guys over in _Finish Line_ are already pretty freaked out, and for all the rest of the arcade knows, Turbo’s dead.”

“I’m not going to kill him,” Vanellope said steadily.  Then, with a smirk she added, “Anyway, _Sugar Rush_ doesn’t have the death penalty.”

With a glance towards Taffyta, Ralph said, “You don’t need it to.  Like pretty-in-pink said, this is his game.  That means we have to bring him outside to do him in.”

“Ralph!” Vanellope yelled.  “C’mon, I don’t wanna _be_ like him!”

Sighing and rubbing a hand over his face, he said, “I know, kid.  I know.  I don’t want to either.  I just…none of us knows what to do.  We don’t want to see you get hurt again.”

Vanellope looked like she couldn’t decide whether to be touched or annoyed.  Looking up at Ralph, the president said, “Yeah, yeah, I know you guys are just looking out for me.  For the whole arcade, actually.”  She stopped and added musingly, “Pretty cool, actually…you and Felix and the Sarge are like the guardians of the arcade!  But.”  She took a breath.  “Maybe if things hadn’t gone down the way they did here after Turbo threw himself into broiling diet cola, I’d feel a little different.  But people _can_ change.”  She looked over at Taffyta but didn’t say anything.  

She didn’t need to.  Her point was clear.  Taffyta just wondered if Vanellope was right.  Sure, she was trying not to be mean like she’d been while Turbo had been in power.  But her dream was in the back of her mind.

Ralph looked like he wanted to continue the discussion, but at that moment, Calhoun brushed the curtain behind the throne aside, and her and Felix reappeared.  Neither of them had the terminal—they must have left it in the code vault.

“All fixed, kiddo!” Felix said.

“Really?”  She didn’t feel any different.  Well, she felt like herself, but besides the glitch, there was no sign Felix had done anything.  “Wow, thank you!”  On impulse, she hugged Felix briefly, though she was way too intimidated by Calhoun to do the same for her, and Ralph…well, she wasn’t sure they were good yet.  They were on their way but it might still be a little while.

Felix blushed a little.  “Aw shucks, it was nothing.  I didn’t even really do any real work.”

Putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing it, Calhoun said, “He’s being modest, as usual.”

That made Felix blush even harder, and he mumbled something that sounded like, “—givin’ me the honeyglow, Tammy…”

Taffyta had no doubt that Felix had done plenty of work.  But as she made arrangements to go home, bubbling with happiness, she couldn’t help but think with a twinge of guilt that there was one person she hadn’t thanked.  And considering she never wanted to go back to the fungeon ever again, that made him one person she’d _never_ thank.

She shook herself and told herself not to feel bad.  After all, _he_ didn’t, not about anything.


	9. Chapter 9

The first thing Taffyta did when she got home to her two-storey house in Strawberry Fields was to check on Pink Lightning.  Cautiously, without knowing what she was afraid of, she pushed open the door to the garage.

The kart gleamed, more ruby than pink, in the sunlight filtering in through the garage’s one window.  Taffyta ran her hands over Pink Lightning and said in a hushed tone, “Sorry.  Didn’t mean to abandon you or anything.”  She patted it.  “You and me are gonna race again now that I’m better.”

Vanellope had already told her that she wasn’t on the roster for the next day but Taffyta, surprising herself, didn’t care.  She just had a good feeling that the randomizer was going to start choosing her a lot more.  So what if it wasn’t tomorrow.  She was going to race, and she was going to win.

She spent awhile in the garage, polishing Pink Lightning, even though the kart didn’t need it.  Someone had definitely been taking care of it while she’d been gone.  Of course, she’d left it at the exit to _Sugar Rush_ when she’d abandoned the game, so someone must have brought it back here.  Taffyta made a note to ask around.

Finally, patting the kart one final time, she let herself out of the garage and skipped up the cobbled gumdrop path to her house.  As she opened the door, she breathed a huge sigh of relief.  She was so glad to be home.

She flipped on the lights as she walked through the white chocolate door, wanting nothing more than to plop down on one of her big, poofy strawberry gummy chairs and revel in being surrounded by her own stuff.  Before she’d taken two steps into the room, though, she heard, “TAFFYTA!” as something hit her with about the same force as a Sweet Seeker, clung, and didn’t let go.

The flame sputtering above her head was a pretty good indication of what was squeezing every bit of air out of her lungs.  “Candlehead!” Taffyta laughed.  “What are you doing here?”

“We went up to the castle to see you,” another voice said, and Taffyta looked around and saw Rancis standing there, twisting his hands together.  “But Vanellope said you came home today.”

“WE MISSED YOU!” Candlehead wailed.  “Oh _Taffyta_ , I thought you were gone _forever_ , I was so scared, and then Vanellope said you were sick and you couldn’t race and we were taking turns filling your spot on the roster but we just wanted you to come back and—”

“Okay, okay, Candlehead!  I’m back!  Pull yourself together!”  Taffyta hugged her friend tightly as she said this, though, feeling tears—happy ones, for once—prick at her eyes.  People had cared about her.  People had missed her.

When Candlehead finally let go—mostly; she wouldn’t relinquish her grip on Taffyta’s hand—Rancis, still looking anxious, said, “Taffyta, I didn’t mean to be _mean_ when I…uh, called you a crybaby, I was just…”

“Joking around?” Taffyta guessed.

Rancis looked sheepish.  “Er, yeah?”

She was tempted to try Vanellope’s execution joke but figured it wouldn’t work as well without the authority of political office behind her.  She tilted her head, her hair swinging.  “Who took care of Pink Lightning while I was gone?”

“Me and Rancis!” Candlehead chirped, swinging her arm, and Taffyta’s with it.

Rancis smiled hesitantly at Taffyta, and she gave him a thumbs up.  Taking care of another racer’s kart was definitely worth some forgiveness.

“Are you okay now?” Candlehead asked.  “What _happened_?  We kept asking about you but Vanellope said you really didn’t feel good—where did you _go_?”

Wondering how much she should say, Taffyta began, “Well, that’s kind of a long story.”

Candlehead pulled her over to a chair, settled Taffyta into it, and said, “I’m going to make you peppermint tea.  Because you’re sick, so people need to take care of you.”

Maybe at another time she would have argued, but after the weird couple days she’d had, she didn’t mind a little mothering.

“So where _did_ you go?” Rancis asked.

Folding her legs up underneath her, Taffyta replied, “ _Extreme EZ Living 2_.”

There was a crash from the kitchen as Candlehead dropped a teacup, and the other girl rushed back into the room, clutching a teabag in one hand and Taffyta’s strawberry-shaped kettle in the other.  “But we’re not supposed to go there!”

Rancis looked impressed.  “Says who?” he asked Candlehead.

“Well…”  Candlehead furrowed her brow.  “Well, King Candy said we couldn’t…but I guess…oh, we don’t have to do what he says anymore…”  She crossed her eyes in concentration.  “But he said we could get a virus if we went.  Is that what happened, Taffyta?”

Taffyta’s face turned red, which she figured was answer enough.  “Turns out he wasn’t lying about everything,” she mumbled, leaving out the part about how she’d been tricked into swallowing the virus herself.  Candlehead looked stricken, and Taffyta rushed to add, “I’m okay now, though!  T—um, Fix-It Felix, you know, from the game _Fix-It Felix Jr._?  He helped fix my code.”  

“Oh, thank gum drops!” Candlehead said, then looked down at the tea bag and kettle in her hand like she couldn’t remember what they were doing there.  Then realization lit her face and she returned to the kitchen.

Rancis’s arms were crossed over his chest and he was giving Taffyta an admiring look.  “You should’ve told me you were going!  I’ve always wanted to check that game out!”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Taffyta said.  When Rancis rolled his eyes, she added, “Seriously.  Everyone was kind of boring.  Not much personality.  You know?”

“Sure,” Rancis said, though his smirk made it obvious he was just humoring her.  “I’m can’t believe you went there though, Taff.  Once _King Candy_ said we couldn’t do something, you were always such a goody two-shoes.  I mean,” he added with a grin, “ _someone_ had to be, ‘cause Crumbelina and Gloyd never listened to anything he said, but I figured _they’d_ be the ones to go to _Extreme EZ Living_.”

“They haven’t _been_?” Taffyta asked, ignoring Rancis’s goody two-shoes remark.  She was afraid if she mentioned anything at all about King Candy, she’d let it slip that he wasn’t dead, and was sitting in the fungeon glitching back and forth between himself and Turbo.  Plus Rancis was right, and there wasn’t much point in arguing.

She was starting to realize that pretending that she _hadn’t_ had the relationship that she had with King Candy, and forcing herself to never acknowledge it, not even in her own mind, wasn’t ever going to make it go away.  It also didn’t make her a bad person for having _been_ friends with him.  At least, she hoped not.

The conversation about what to do with Turbo popped back into her head and she felt guilty all over again for not even thanking him.  He’d helped her.  He’d helped her and gotten nothing out of it that she could see, and Calhoun wanted to kill him and Taffyta had a feeling that if and when word got out that he’d survived Diet Cola Mountain, her opinion would be shared by a good number of other people in the arcade, if not a good number of people in _Sugar Rush_ itself.

Rancis’s answer forced her to put her thoughts aside.  “You know Crumbelina, she always talks big.  She’s gonna be _so_ jealous when she finds out you went!”

At that moment, Candlehead returned from the kitchen with a cup of steaming tea, which she carried to Taffyta, staring at it the whole time like she was afraid it was going to leap out of her hands.  “I’m glad you didn’t stay in that other game, Taffy,” the other girl said.  Taffyta looked at her, taking the tea.  Candlehead only called her Taffy when she was emotional.

A rush of feeling swept through her.  She had really been _stupid_.  All she’d been able to think about was the randomizer not choosing her, and that had made her feel worthless, and all her confusion about King Candy had just made her…well, kind of forget that she had friends who cared about her.

“Me too,” Taffyta said, smiling at Candlehead and Rancis.  “Who needs other games when we live in _Sugar Rush_ , anyway?”

 

* * *

 

 

She could hear the Cy-Bug whispering to her before she could see it this time.  Snow blinded her as she drove and she tried to tell herself that the voice was just the wind, but in her heart she knew who it was.  _What_ it was.  The deep thrumming of its wingbeats turned her code to ice and then it was in front of her, its deranged smile plastered on its face.

Her tears froze on her face as it snatched her out of her kart and they rocketed into the air, just like every time she’d had this dream.

Just like always, its mouth gaped open, sharp light glinting off the serrated edges of its teeth.

But then something different happened.

The Cy-Bug flipped her in its claws and she screamed.  The terror of being eaten had always overwhelmed her fear of falling, but now she felt her stomach drop as she plummeted a foot or two through empty air before the bug caught her again.

She found herself hanging upside down, one claw clasped around her ankle, dangling in front of the Cy-Bug’s face as it regarded her.  “Stho tell me, my dear,” it said.  “What exthactly isth it that you find _stho_ repugnant in the idea of sharing sthomething in common with me?”

The shock of her dream’s monster trying to hold a conversation with her kept her silent.  But then, the Cy-Bug shook her, and she said, “Everyt-thing!”

“Oho, be sthpecthific, _pleasthe_.  Think of it asth…”  He tapped the tip of a claw on his chin.  “…an essthay questhtion on the testht of are-you-for- _dinner-_ tonight-or-not.”

_This is stupid.  This is a_ dream _.  Just wake up._   But her unconscious wouldn’t obey, and when the bug tilted its head, its long neck snaking, she gulped and said, “I don’t want to hurt people like you did.”

The Cy-Bug hooted with laughter, clapping its hands together—and dropping her in the process.  She fell, shrieking, only to be caught again by one of its many legs and handed upwards until it had her in its claws again.  This time the bug hooked a claw through the back of her jacket.  She felt the tip poking through her hair and into the skin at the base of her skull.  At least she wasn’t upside down anymore.  “But haven’t you been over thisth, _Taffycakesth_?  Remember how you treated Vanellope?”

“I-I don’t want to be like that anymore,” she said.

“You can’t change who you are.”

Then, for the first time in this nightmare, an emotion besides terror shot through her.  “You’re wrong,” she said.

“Hoohoohoo, am I?” the bug asked.  “Or are you justht _telling_ yoursthelf that stho you don’t feel like sthuch a _monsthter_ yoursthelf for sthtill caring about one?”

And that was when she woke up.

Taffyta put a hand to the back of her neck, feeling the spot that the Cy-Bug had been jabbing its claw into her.  The skin, of course, was unbroken.  She shuddered anyway.

What a way to start her first morning back home!  Taffyta sucked in a breath and rubbed at her eyes blearily.  Candlehead and Rancis had stayed practically till arcade opening, and Taffyta guessed she’d gotten pretty used to sleeping away most of the day while up at the castle, because she felt like she could fall right back asleep.

With a yawn, though, she slid out of bed.  She hadn’t driven in a week, and she wanted to take Pink Lightning out on whatever tracks the gamers weren’t using today.  Cereal Box Canyon was a good one, with the train crossing at the canyon’s entrance, it was always a challenge.

About halfway through the day, she was joined by Rancis, Candlehead, and Jubileena, and the four of them raced non-competitively—only not really, because Taffyta could never view any race as _totally_ non-competitive.

As arcade closing approached, the four of them headed towards the stadium.  No one wanted to miss the next day’s roster going up.  Though as they got closer, and Taffyta began feeling her stomach clench in anxiety, she thought she might cover her eyes and just let someone tell her if she was up on the board or not.

The other racers were already gathered at the starting line, milling around while they waited.  Snowanna was the first to spot Taffyta as Pink Lightning rolled to a stop, and the other girl let out a shout and made a beeline for Taffyta.  As soon as everyone realized what was happening, they mobbed her.

When they finally dispersed, Vanellope punched Taffyta on the shoulder and asked, “How ya feeling?”

In answer, Taffyta gave her a thumbs-up.  Her throat was too tight with nervousness to speak—the jumbotron had just lit up.

“Oh spice drops, I can’t watch,” she squeaked, clapping her hands over her eyes.  But then, she slitted two fingers and peeked up at the board.

Vanellope von Schweetz.

Torvald Batterbutter.

Minty Zaki.

Candlehead.

Gloyd Orangeboar.

Jubileena Bing-Bing.

Snowanna Rainbeau.

Rancis Fluggerbutter.

And Taffyta Muttonfudge.

Taffyta’s arms dropped to her sides.  She stared, blinking to make sure she was seeing correctly.  Then, her heart leaping in her chest, she yelled, “I GET TO RACE!” and threw her arms around the nearest two people, who happened to be Vanellope and Candlehead.  Letting go of them, she bounced up and down, twirling at the same time, and honestly doing a pretty good imitation of Candlehead, chanting, “I-get-to-race-I-get-to-race-I-get-to-RACE!  You guys!”  She stopped, out of breath, her cheeks hurting from the huge grin on her face, and looked at them.  “You guys, I’m gonna make you eat my sugar dust.”

With a grin, Vanellope said, “You’re on, Muttonfudge.”

Taffyta took a lollipop out of her pocket and stuck it into her mouth, smiling around it.  She was going to do a lap around the Royal Raceway just for fun, and then she was going to go home and make sure Pink Lightning was in pristine, peak condition for tomorrow.

Because she was going to win.


	10. Chapter 10

The starting line always felt crowded at Frosty Rally.  The track was narrow, more like a bobsled chute than a road in some places, but Taffyta loved it.  Of the game’s three mountain courses, it was the intermediate one, but Frosty Rally was still more advanced than a lot of the game’s other tracks.  Sure, she’d won today on Sweet Ride, and Cakewalk, and Chocolate Seashell Beach, but she wanted a challenge.  Anyway, the gamers had all been controlling her on those races, but this time they’d chosen Gloyd and Minty, and Taffyta was free to employ every trick in her arsenal to win.  And this was the last race of the day—the arcade would close in a minute, and these gamers were sneaking one last game in under the wire.  She _was_ going to win.

She pulled down her visor to keep the blowing snow out of her face and glanced over at Candlehead, who shivered and revved her engine.  The flames from her exhaust pipes melted some of the freshly fallen snow on the track—it would be ice by the time they zoomed back through here for the second lap, and Taffyta made a mental note of that.

A marshmallow holding the traffic signal drifted into position and motioned to his colleagues.  The top light on the signal lit up red and Taffyta tapped her foot down on the accelerator, just enough so that the kart’s engine hummed, and gripped her fingers around the gearstick.  On yellow she gave Pink Lightning a rev, and then—this was always the longest moment in any race, it was like an eternity passed between yellow and green—the bottom light lit up.  She shifted a fraction of a second before in anticipation, and then she floored it away from the starting line.

Her kart’s acceleration had never been the best in the game, but that was okay.  Vanellope, Gloyd, and Snowanna shot out in front of her and she trailed them closely.  King Candy had taught her the value of letting the elements, and the other racers, take out the competition.  If this was Sno-Cap Peak, she could have relied on giant, chocolate pocked snowballs rolling down the track.  Frosty Rally didn’t have anything like that.  Though it _was_ possible to go sliding off the edge of the mountain in some places.  Taffyta hadn’t fallen off the road on this course in thirteen years.

Narrowing her eyes and accelerating, she hit a power up.  Sprinkle Spikes.  Ugh, well, at least she could take care of Candlehead and Rancis, who were right on her tail.  “Sorry, guys!” she shouted as she punched the button to use the power-up.

Candlehead screamed as she hit the spikes and Rancis spun out of control and hit the wall.  Taffyta giggled.  She wasn’t sorry.  The two of them should be happy that she’d used the power-up in a spot with guardrails.

Taffyta flicked her eyes towards the side mirror.  Minty and Jubileena were visible but not posing an imminent threat.  Looked like poor Minty had gotten stuck with a gamer who didn’t know how to drive in the snow.  And Torvald wasn’t even in sight.  

Time to concentrate on the race’s leaders.  Hunching down over the steering wheel, Taffyta downshifted on a curving slope.  Gloyd, right in front of her, fishtailed and slid to the outside of the track.  When Taffyta felt her own kart begin to fishtail, she turned into the motion and felt Pink Lightning right herself, and she passed Gloyd with a spray of snow.

As she approached the finish line for lap two, Vanellope, in first place, hit the icy patch that Taffyta had made a note of and spun out.  “Gooey _gumdrops_!” the president yelled in frustration as Taffyta whizzed by her.

By this point, Rancis and Candlehead were hot on her tail.  “Payback, Muttonfudge!” Rancis yelled.  An ice cream scoop catapult materialized on his kart, courtesy of an A La Mode power up, and a scoop of ice cream came sailing towards her.

_“And that, Taffyta, isth where you got into trouble.”_

_King Candy rewound the video and Taffyta watched herself brake and swerve to avoid the ice cream, screaming as she lost control of her kart.  She ricocheted off the blue raspberry ice cliff to one side, which caused her to careen across the track and sail right over the side of the mountain.  He stopped the video.  “Stho.  Firstht lessthon.  What did you do wrong?”_

_Taffyta tried to control her nervousness.  When King Candy had agreed to help her be a better racer, part of her maybe hadn’t believed it would really happen.  But here they were in the video room, black-out licorice curtains drawn over the windows and the room lit only by the glowing screen displaying yesterday’s disastrous race.  King Candy was sitting in a chair, one leg crossed over the other, tapping a finger absently on his knee while he stared at her._

_“Well.”  Taffyta cleared her throat.  “I lost control of my kart.”_

_“Why?”_

_“You can’t brake really hard like that in icy conditions.”  She watched the video as it replayed.  “And…when I didn’t get any traction, I turned the wheel too hard.  You’re not supposed to do that, either.”_

_King Candy smiled.  “Very good.  But.”  He leaned forward.  “You already know thosthe thingsth._ Why _did you react like that?”_

_Fingering the zipper on her jacket, she said, “I didn’t want to get hit with the A La Mode.”_

_“And why wasth that?”_

_She wasn’t sure what he was getting at.  “Who does?”_

_He arched an eyebrow.  Wrong answer.  But he didn’t make her feel stupid about it, he made her want to think more.  “I guess…” she said, “I guess that I kind of…panicked.”  His head tilted in a nod, both an acknowledgement of what she’d said and an invitation to go on.  She folded her hands in her lap, feeling less fidgety and nervous.  “I thought I’d lose for sure if I got hit.  And…yeah.  I panicked about that.”_

_“Good girl.”_

_Something in her swelled with pride and she couldn’t keep the smile off her face._

_Leaning forward, King Candy said, “You’re a good racther, Taffyta.  But a really_ great _racther never panicsth.  About_ anything _.  Not losthing, not falling off Sthno-Cap Peak, not dying.  When you panic,_ that’sth _what takesth over, and everything that you know isth justht_ gone _.”_ He snapped his fingers for emphasis on this last word.  _“You can come back from anything in a racthe asth long asth you don’t let your emotionsth—hoo-hoo—run away with you.”_

_She nodded slowly.  “I think I can do that.  Except…”_

_Tilting his head, he asked, “Excthept what?”_

_With a sheepish smile, she said, “I don’t think I can help being happy when I’m racing.”_

_King Candy shot her a bright grin.  “You can get away with_ that _one.  I’m never happier than when I’m racthing—and you know, hoohoohoo, I win all the time.”_

Taffyta watched the trajectory of the incoming scoop of ice cream and then nudged her steering wheel.  The adjustment was just enough that the ice cream splattered into the road next to her.  A glob landed on her visor and she wiped it off.

In her mirror, she saw Candlehead plow right into the scoop, snuffing her candle out in the process.  Rancis was still behind Taffyta but couldn’t catch up—but coming up fast was Vanellope.  And there was still Snowanna, in the lead, to deal with.

Taffyta hit the course’s only boost pad and used it to pull off a risky drift on a curve, which increased her lead over Rancis and Vanellope and brought her right up onto Snowanna’s tail.

Snowanna disgorged a Cherry Bomb but Taffyta avoided it, hearing it explode behind her and feeling a breath of heat across her back.  Rancis and Vanellope were unaffected too, and gaining.

Lap three began and Taffyta got serious.  On the same turn that she’d passed Gloyd on, she cut to the inside, trusting herself and her kart to remain in control.  Snowanna stayed too far to the outside and suddenly Taffyta was in first place.

She grinned fiercely as she nabbed a power-up, then glanced in her mirror in time to see a flash of blue.  Vanellope glitched and was suddenly right beside Taffyta.

“I think this is my race, Pinky!” Vanellope yelled as the finish line approached.

Taffyta smirked.  “Not this time, Pres!”

Then she hit the power-up button.  She’d been saving it for this moment—Sugar Rush.  A boost of super speed that was faster, even, than Vanellope’s glitching.

She zoomed across the finish line in first place, hardly hearing the cheering of the crowd over the hammering of her heart and the rush of blood in her ears and joy in her own head.

Pumping a fist in the air, Taffyta braked in a spray of vanilla snow, then hopped out of her kart.  Vanellope and Snowanna were looking pleased with themselves for getting second and third.  Rancis and Candlehead were just crossing the finish line in fourth and fifth, Gloyd close behind them in sixth.  The board, much smaller than the jumbotron at the stadium, showed Minty, Jubileena, and Torvald within thirty seconds of finishing.  But since neither of the gamers’ avatars had placed, the gamers wouldn’t see the trophies get awarded, and the winners didn’t have to wait.

Taffyta felt buoyant as she accepted her gold trophy and the congratulations of the others.  She hadn’t been this happy in a long time, maybe not since before the game had reset.  And the funny thing was, not much had changed.  That was, until she started thinking about it, and then…well then, everything had kind of changed.  

_“You should know that you have a fan in the fungeon.”_

The words echoed so loudly in her head that she looked around, wondering if someone had actually said them out loud.  But of course not—Turbo was still locked up.

She stared at her reflection in her shining gold trophy, blinking at herself.  Would…would he care about this?  And would _she_ care if he did?

Before she could figure out what she was thinking, Jubileena said, “Hey guys, it’s _freezing_ up here, let’s go to Chocolate Seashell Beach!”  She cupped her hands around her face and blew warm air into them.  “We can go swimming!  We haven’t gone swimming for _ages_!”

Vanellope twirled her goggles once around her finger.  “I don’t know,” she said, chewing at her lip.  “Are you guys sure you wanna get in those gummy shark infested waters?”  At the horrified looks on all of their faces, she snorted and said, “I’m just _kidding_ , geez, you guys make it too easy.”

Amidst the laughter and teasing, Taffyta sidled up to Vanellope and said, “Hey, Pres.”

“Hey Taff!” Vanellope said.  “Are you gonna swim or just work on your tan?”

“Actually,” Taffyta said, “I think I might need to skip the trip to the beach.”  When Vanellope looked disappointed, Taffyta rushed to say, “I mean, maybe I’ll come after—yeah, I will, I just…there’s something I have to do.  Is it okay if I go to the castle?”

Vanellope’s eyebrows shot up, but then said, “Sure thing, that’s fine.  You know your way around.”

She felt transparent but didn’t really care.  She was starting to realize that being transparent around Vanellope wasn’t the worst thing.  Vanellope _herself_ was transparent.  You never had to wonder about what she was thinking or where you stood with her.  There was something pretty nice about that, actually.

“Thanks,” she said, hugging her trophy to herself.  Without saying anything to anyone else, she ran to her kart and jumped in, waving to the others as she sped off.

With the roads clear, she made it to the castle in no time at all.  She left her visor on the seat and, with some regret, her trophy.  Then she knocked on the front doors.

“Yes?” Sour Bill asked in a flat tone as he opened the door.

“Oh, hi,” Taffyta said.  “I just came by to…well, I was wondering, that is, Vanellope said I could stop by.  I was going to go down to the fungeon, but—Sour Bill, are the castle gardens still there?”

Sour Bill looked at her, a dour expression on his face, and then motioned with a hand for her to follow.

Taffyta couldn’t help grinning in victory as she pulled the doors shut behind her.

 

* * *

 

 

Half an hour later, she knocked on the door to Turbo’s cell.

“Hi,” she said hesitantly, when he looked over at her.  “I—um, I brought you this.”  She held up a basket of watermelon sours.  “They’re from the castle garden.”  King Candy had liked them, and the garden they grew in, though he hadn’t much cared for the actual garden _ing_.  Sour Bill was the one who’d done all of that, and had kept it up since Vanellope’s ascension to _Sugar Rush’s_ leadership.  The gardens were well-pruned and thriving, and Taffyta had commented, as she’d picked watermelon sours off the vine, that it looked really nice.  Sour Bill had just shrugged.

Turbo glitched so quickly to King Candy that she barely even saw his red binary.  For the first time, she wondered what prompted that.  Vanellope’s glitching had always gotten worse when she’d been upset or emotional.  Did Turbo’s, too?

“I didn’t do anything to them,” she said, lifting them higher.

King Candy got to his feet, bouncy even in his imprisonment.  “I never harbored the sthuspicthion,” he said.  Then, he took a few hesitant steps towards the door.  “I didn’t exthpect to sthee you again.  Sthour Bill sthaysth you’re all better.”

Taffyta raised her eyebrows.  “Sour Bill _volunteered_ that?”  Wow, she hadn’t thought he cared enough to pay attention.

“I asthked, actually,” King Candy said casually.

“You did?”

“Of coursthe I did.  I—”  He stopped, then flicked a wrist.  “Well, of coursthe I did.”  He took the basket from her, needing to bend it to make it fit through the bars on the window, and set it down on the foot of his bed.  Then, he picked up one of the watermelon sours and took a bite out of it.  “Stho, to what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, and with a gesture to the basket, added, “and the generousth presthent?”

Taffyta shrugged, the truth being that she barely knew herself.  “Vanellope said she’s been feeding you Bits-O-Honey and Ribena.  I thought maybe you’d want something else for a change.”

King Candy wrinkled his nose, confirming this.  “She’sth sthadisthtic.  You do know that, don’t you?”

“If your sentence is eating gross food, I’d say you’re getting off pretty light.”

He popped the rest of the watermelon sour into his mouth.  “Remind me to thank the glitch later.”

She pretended not to hear the epithet, watched him eat another watermelon sour—he seemed hungry, and she couldn’t blame him, based on his normal menu—and then, in a casual tone, said, “So, um, I raced today.”

“Did you?”  His eyes lit up.  Actually lit up.  Like he cared for real.  “Tell me you beat the glitch.”

_Oh._   Her heart plummeted, and Taffyta crossed her arms over her chest, unable to ignore the slur twice.  “Vanellope.”  No matter how many times she corrected him, she had a feeling she wasn’t going to get him to call the president by her name.  “Is that the only reason you’re asking?  Because you want to…to like, beat her vicariously?  Through me?”  

“No!”  King Candy looked wounded.  “I’m _asthking_ becausthe I know how important racthing _isth_ to you.  You’re like—you know—me.”

The nightmare pounced on her then and she felt her eyes widen and her breathing quicken.

A furrow appeared in King Candy’s brow.  “Oh.  Right.  That’sth justht about the lastht thing you want to hear.”

Taffyta took a deep breath.  She had to get this under control or she might start having full-blown panic attacks.  And something in King Candy’s tone—even though he couldn’t possibly know why she’d reacted that way—was reassuring.  He’d always been such a sweet man.  Funny that he’d retained just a bit of that part of his act.  At least…she thought it was an act.

“Stho…” King Candy asked, watching her carefully, “did you win?”

She thought about the day, and how really great it had been, and suddenly the nightmare was…well, not gone, really, but pushed into the background.  Waiting, she guessed.  Lurking, maybe.  But right now she was happy.  “Yeah,” she said, unable to stop the broad grin from spreading across her face.  “I _did_ win some races.  Actually a lot of races.”  She tilted her helmet up and added, “I got first on Frosty Rally.”

“Of coursthe you did, _no one_ can beat you on Frosthty Rally,” King Candy said.  There was a note of pride in his voice.

“Except you,” she pointed out.

“Well, obviousthly.  But I don’t count.”  He narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth to speak, but then he met her gaze and swallowed whatever he’d been about to say.  Instead, he clasped his hands behind him and rocked back on his heels.  “Well done, my dear.  I’m happy that virusth of yoursth didn’t take you out of the game for long.”

She tried to ignore the ‘my dear’ and the affection she heard in the words.  Except, if she wanted to ignore that, then…why was she here?  Because she wanted reassurance, that was why.  She wanted to know that she’d been his favorite for _real_ , that it hadn’t been an act to make her pliable, to turn her into a willing lackey, to help him control Vanellope without him ever even asking.

And…if she got that reassurance, what was she going to do with it?  He was _Turbo_.  He was a criminal, a game-stealer, a liar.  At _best_.  At worst he was a killer.  And a sociopath.

What kind of person wanted to be a sociopath’s favorite?  His _friend_?  What did that make _her_?

She felt phantom claws squeezing her and shook the feeling off.  But she couldn’t stop the wild look in her eyes.  And she couldn’t stop King Candy from noticing.

His brow furrowed and he took a step closer to the door.  “Isth everything all right?”

Taffyta swallowed and remembered how it had felt to be able to go to him when things weren’t.  And against her better judgment, she said, “I’ve been having nightmares.”

“Nightmaresth?” he asked, sounding confused.  “Well, I…wouldn’t know, you look well-resthted—”

“Is it because of the virus?” she interrupted.

A glitch rippled through him.  “No.  No, that wasth one of the few thingsth that _wasthn’t_ a sthymptom.”

“Oh.”  She’d been hoping that had been it, because at least it could be fixed then.  She sank down on a bittersweet chocolate chair that was sitting outside the door.  “ _Oh_.”  She planted her elbows on her knees and stared at the floor.

There was a noise above her and she glanced up to find King Candy staring through the barred window at her.  “What kind of nightmaresth?” he asked.

The crumbling defenses that had made her admit to the dreams went back up.  “They’re…they’re nothing.”

He laced his fingers together on the window and rested his chin on his knuckles.  “You never usthed to have bad dreamsth.”

“I never used to have anything to have bad dreams _about_ ,” Taffyta mumbled.

For a minute, he stared at her thoughtfully.  Then he said, “I’m sthort of a sthufferer mysthelf.”

“ _You_ have nightmares?” she asked.  He looked like he regretted admitting this, but then he nodded.  Taffyta folded her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees.  “What do _you_ have nightmares about?”

King Candy hesitated, and then he raised an eyebrow.  “Oh, pleasthe, you can’t think of _anything_ that I might have bad dreamsth about?”

One of her feet slipped off the chair.  “No, but—well, I just would think someone like you…”

“What, _Turbo_ , the terrifying _monsthter_ that’sth haunted the arcade for twenty-five yearsth, doesthn’t stheem like the type?”  When she didn’t say anything, he withdrew his hands, which he’d stuck through the bars, his fingers curled into claws.  Replacing them on the window, he said, “Yeah.  Don’t tell anyone.”

She just made a noncommittal noise.  Who would she tell?

King Candy hung an arm out the window.  “What’sth the nightmare about?”

Funny how even though she’d never said it was the _same_ nightmare, he’d guessed that anyway.  Taffyta bit her lip and looked up at him, her throat frozen.  Then, she said, “You.  You as a Cy-Bug.”

His eyebrows shot up.  “Oh.”

“You _did_ turn into a Cy-Bug, didn’t you?”  She wasn’t sure if she wanted the answer to this to be yes or no.  She knew it was true, but…but she hadn’t actually seen it, and…and it might be nice to pretend it hadn’t happened.

He took his hands off the window.  “I wasth _eaten_ by a Cthy-Bug.”  All traces of his good mood, pretense or not, vanished.

Picking at her shoelaces, she asked, “What’s the difference?  They turn into whatever they eat.  That’s why they were all made of candy.”

There was a funny look in his eyes.  If she didn’t know better, she’d have called it haunted.  But he didn’t answer.  Instead, he cleared his throat and said, “Well, that mustht be…troubling for you.”

She looked up and met his eyes before he glanced away.  Maybe, she thought, he dreamt about it, too.  Maybe however much of him had been left in that…that thing, had been just as scared as she was when she dreamt about it.  Only a hundred times worse, because it had been real, and now he had those memories, and…

She was beginning to see what he might have nightmares about.

Standing up, she said, “Can I ask you something?”

King Candy looked tired suddenly, but he replied with a smile, “Anything.”

_Ask, but it doesn’t mean I’ll answer_.  His smile could have meant that, or it could have been sincere—she just couldn’t tell.  Even face to face, looking into his eyes, she couldn’t tell sincerity from artifice.  “You glitch—or whatever you want to call it—between Turbo and King Candy.  So…so why not the Cy-Bug, too?”

“I can’t sthay for sure without getting a look at my own code,” he said.

A non-answer.  Figured.

“But,” he went on, surprising her, “I think the sthimple exthplanation isth that the Cthy-Bugsth are justht a virusth outsthide their own game.  _I_ coded mysthelf into _Sugar Rush_ with both persthonas, but the bug part, that wasth justht…exthtra.”

“So, like, the reset just wiped it away?”

He made a sweeping gesture with his hand.  “Clean sthlate.  Justht left me with thisth little—hoo-hoo—handicap.”  He flickered red and she thought again that he had more control over his glitching than he maybe let on.

For a minute, she just stood there in silence, picking at one of the fingers of her racing gloves.  Then, she said quietly, “That’s a really horrible thing to happen to anyone.”

“What, thisth glitching?  It’sth really not that bad.  Kind of fun, actually, I think I’d be a big hit at partiesth.  Not that I wasthn’t alwaysth, hoohoohoo.”

“No.”  Taking a breath and looking up at him, she said, “Getting eaten by a Cy-Bug.  Getting taken over by something else and—and turning into something that you don’t want to be.”

He stared at her for a long time and eventually, she looked back down towards her feet.  Then he said, “I’m sthorry that _you_ had to exthperiencthe it.  Not the Cthy-Bug part, I mean, but, you know, they’re a virusth.  They’re not that different from what that low-life taffy sthwamp sthcum did to you in _Exthtreme EZTH Living 2_.”

With a joyless smile, she said, “They’re pretty different.  I mean, I didn’t grow wings or anything.”

King Candy shook his head.  “It’sth about making you into a vector.  Sthpreading the corrupted code.  It—”  He stopped and his eyes widened and unfocussed abruptly, as though something had just occurred to him.  Then he gave himself a shake, and the look was gone.  With a half-smile—just as mirthless as hers had been—he said, “Eat, kill, multiply.  That’sth pretty much all any virusth wants to do, whether you sthwallow it at a rave or get your _sthelf_ sthwallowed by a half-insthect, half-machine monsthtrosthity.”

There was a hard edge to his voice, incongruous with his lilting tone, and Taffyta watched him through her bangs.  Then, he twirled a hand—not a care in the world, as debonair and flamboyant as always—and said, “You don’t want to hear thisth sthtuff, Taffyta.  You _won_ today.  You should be with your friendsth, not hanging around the fungeon.”  He tilted his head and giggled.  “Desthpite how delightfully _fun_ it isth.”

“Well, I _did_ kind of promise I’d go to the beach,” she said.

He smiled at her and she realized with a start that she was going to be sad to turn around and go.

_He’s Turbo_.

_But maybe he can change._

Taffyta hoped so.  When she turned to leave, she only got a few steps before she stopped and faced him again.  “Maybe I’ll come back some other time.”

A glitch garbled him.  “That would be…nicthe.”

With a nod, she turned and walked down the long corridor.  She reached the end of the hall, and as she rounded the corner, she looked over her shoulder.

She didn’t know if she was surprised or not that King Candy was still standing at his cell’s door.  Hesitantly, she lifted her hand to wave.  He returned the gesture with a small, crooked smile, and then, her heart feeling fluttery and torn in a million different directions, she was on her way up the stairs and out of the fungeon.


	11. Chapter 11

For the next three days, Taffyta was on the roster.  Then, on the evening of the third, the jumbotron didn’t display her name.

Taffyta crossed her arms over her chest and pouted, a lollipop sticking out of her mouth.  Then she took a breath and reminded herself that she couldn’t be on a random roster _every_ day.  Even if, with her confidence back, she was winning more than her fair share of races.

Anyway, for once, Vanellope wasn’t on the roster either, which allayed Taffyta’s tiny remaining fear that the president was a default racer every day.

She glanced around, wondering if she should go home or hang out with someone—Candlehead, Rancis, and Vanellope were discussing something, maybe she should join them.  Then another thought occurred to her, and she turned towards the castle, looking at it shining in the distance.  Since the last conversation she’d had with King Candy—which, though there’d been nothing normal about the subject matter, had felt almost, _almost_ like the way things had been before—she hadn’t been to the fungeon.  Maybe she should visit him again.  She was no rehabilitation program, but…

The decision seemed to make itself.  Smiling without even realizing it, she started to climb into her kart.

“Hey, Taffyta!”

The voice made her shriek and jump.  She turned around to see Rancis standing there, smirking at her.  “Hey,” she said, putting a hand over her chest.

He cocked his head at her.  “I was gonna ask if you wanna come over to my house with Vanellope and Candlehead and me, but you looked like you were going somewhere.”

“Oh!”  Taffyta glanced back up at the castle.  No other words came to her.

The gesture didn’t escape Rancis’s notice.  “What’s up there?”  When Taffyta turned and stared at him, her eyes wide, he added, “At the castle?  I thought I heard you ask Vanellope if you could go there the other day.  But she was with us, so…I couldn’t figure out why you wanted to go.”

“Just…uh…”  Even though Vanellope hadn’t _said_ not to tell anyone about Turbo, Taffyta was sure that it would be a bad idea to mention him.  The president was right, an announcement that he was still alive _would_ just scare everyone.  Taffyta letting it slip?  That would be a hundred times worse.

Rancis’s smirk deepened.  “Do you have like, a boyfriend up there that we don’t know about or something?”

“Ha, _ha_ ,” Taffyta said.  “I just forgot something from when I was staying up there and I went back to get it.”  _Don’t ask what, don’t ask what, don’t ask what_.

With a shrug, Rancis said, “Oh, okay.  So, do you wanna come with us or not?”

The thought of Turbo in his cell flashed through her mind, but if she said she had to somewhere else, even home, Rancis might get suspicious, and the last thing she wanted to do was betray Vanellope’s trust.  “Yeah!” she said.  “Definitely.”

That was the thing, she guessed, with the fungeon—she could always go see him another day.  It wasn’t like Turbo was going anywhere.

“By the way,” Taffyta said, “speaking of _me_ having a boyfriend— _you_ should talk.  You and Vanellope seem like you’ve been hanging out a lot.”

Making a face, Rancis said, “Yuck!  No way.  Girls have cooties.”

“Princesses don’t have cooties,” Taffyta said with an air of superiority.

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure presidents have normal cooties just like everyone else.  So, in summary, _gross_ ,” Rancis said.

Taffyta wiggled her fingers at him and said, “Uh oh, look out, you might get _my_ cooties!”

Rancis ducked out of her way and bolted towards where Vanellope and Candlehead were waiting, which led to an impromptu game of tag.

Yep, things were good in _Sugar Rush._   Taffyta was a racer—she was a _winner_ —she was surrounded by friends, and even the one complication of Turbo’s presence seemed to be getting…a little less complicated?  Maybe?  Funny how everything had just fallen into place.

 

* * *

 

 

The next day, Taffyta decided to do what she never did, which was go to the stadium to watch a few races.  She timed it well—the gamers had selected the Royal Raceway, so she took a seat with the assorted fans and clasped her hands in her lap, watching the quarter alert sign flash at the bottom of the jumbotron and the day’s nine racers take their places at the starting line.  Rancis and Candlehead were both out there, looking determined.  Taffyta waved at Candlehead, but the other girl just nodded back.  Racing mode—no distractions.  She wasn’t hurt.

The crowd roared as the race began, and Taffyta leaned forward in her seat to watch everyone tear away from the starting line.  Candlehead and Rancis opened up an early lead, Gloyd close behind them, and by the time the racers were through the town square a cloud of cocoa dust obscured them.

She turned her attention to the jumbotron instead, sitting back and letting the fans around her do the cheering.  They went a little overboard, Taffyta had to admit.  Sure, the race was exciting and everything, but the racers were just getting to Gumball Gorge and no one had even had a _chance_ to be taken out by a gumball yet.

Candlehead, Rancis, Gloyd, and player-controlled Adorabeezle made it through the Gorge, but a gumball smashed into Swizz.  As usual.  Taffyta smirked.  Then Gloyd hit Adorabeezle with a power-up, missing the boost pad in the process, which left Candlehead and Rancis out in the lead.

Her mind drifted, as it looked like one of the two of them had the race in the bag—the Royal Raceway was only one lap, it being the longest and most difficult track in the game.  Kind of funny that they still called it the Royal Raceway, considering _Sugar Rush_ was a constitutional democracy now.  Then again, the alliteration was nice.  She’d always liked that sort of thing

She smoothed her dress out, tilting her head at the way the sparkles caught the light, and glanced up at the jumbotron in time to see Rancis coming down the straightaway towards the finish line.

Then everything went silent.

Not the fans, they were yelling as loudly as ever, but all the ambient noise in the game—all the birdsong, the wind, the honey pot bees buzzing around—it was all just _gone_.

Taffyta felt a weird buzzing through her body and she stood up.  Something bad was happening, she could feel it in her code.  And she didn’t mean that the way they all said it sometimes, she really could feel… _something_ , something in her, like every byte of her was shuddering, and her stomach sloshed around with queasiness.

Something stabbed through her, not pain, just the sensation of _wrongness_ , and there was a ripping sound louder even than the crowd’s cheering.

The sky turned a weird red color, fizzing with binary around its edges.  Then, as Taffyta watched, her heart in her throat, a crevasse opened up across the finish line, sharp and jagged and glitchy, scrolling with binary and discharging bolts of energy.

One of the bolts crashed into a stand, and it slowly tipped forward.  Screaming fans fell into the crevasse and Taffyta covered her mouth with her hands.  Everyone else panicked.  The seats around her emptied, NPCs were tripping and falling over each other to get away from the stadium, and all Taffyta could do was stare at the—the _thing_ ripping the finish line apart.

She’d forgotten all about the race but at that moment, Rancis came zooming down the track.  The victorious smile on his face turned to confusion as he saw the pandemonium in the stands.  Distracted by that, he almost didn’t see the crack spread across the finish line.  Which was growing—Taffyta saw that now, every time it spat out a bolt of energy, it got wider.

Rancis saw the crevasse just in time and slammed on his brakes.  His kart disappeared in a cloud of sugar dust but when it cleared, he was standing several feet away, staring in shock.  The other racers were closing in on the finish line by now, but enough NPCs were fleeing that none of them bothered to come see what was wrong—they just left the track to head directly to the Rainbow Bridge that led to the game’s exit.  The memory of the last time NPCs had been stampeding out of the stadium was still fresh.

Then Taffyta’s paralysis lifted as she realized— _Vanellope_.  Someone had to find Vanellope!

Jumping out of the stands—bouncing over them three at a time—she hit the ground and ran to Rancis’s side.  He was still staring in disbelief at the crevasse.  The bolts of red energy shooting out of it were increasing, most dissipating into the air, but a few landed on the track or the swiftly emptying stands. 

Taffyta yanked on Rancis’s arm and he stumbled back.  “Do you know where Vanellope is today?” she demanded.

“Wh-what?  No, I haven’t seen her…” he said, sounding dazed.

“Okay, okay, think…”  The arcade wasn’t closed which meant Vanellope wouldn’t be over in _Fix-It Felix Jr._   The castle, maybe?  She could check, at least, and then, and then…well she’d think of where Vanellope liked to hang out, but maybe she wouldn’t have to.

Her heart pounding, she turned to face the castle.  The sparkling white turrets were so _far_.  Her shoulders slumped but then she heard Rancis say, “Are you going to look for Vanellope at the castle?  Because I can give you a ride…”

She whirled.  Why hadn’t she thought of that?  Because she was no good in a crisis situation, that was why.  If Vanellope were here, she’d be able to keep people from panicking…well maybe, the glitching crevasse was growing wider by the minute, creeping closer and closer to where Rancis and Taffyta were standing, and where—

“Pixie sticks, your kart, Rancis!” she yelped.  The front wheels were only inches from the widening gully.

Rancis leapt into action, throwing himself into the kart’s seat and starting the engine in one movement.  A stream of glitchy energy shot out from the crevasse, grazing the back of the kart and making red binary shutter across it.  

With a screech of tires and a cloud of sugar dust, Rancis pulled up beside Taffyta, and she jumped in and hung on as he floored it.

Reaching the castle seemed to take forever, and when they finally got there, Taffyta hopped out of Rancis’s kart and tried the door.  But when she pulled on the looped handle of the lollipop knocker, it didn’t budge.  She pulled again, more out of disbelief, and then banged on the door.  Why was no one _answering_?

Then the day grew dark.

Rancis gasped and Taffyta turned around, just in time to watch two orange papers, large enough to cover both console screens, come down.

_Sugar Rush_ was out of order.

Color drained from Rancis’s face and Taffyta couldn’t breathe for a second.  Then she redoubled her pounding on the door, shouting for Wynchel or Duncan or Sour Bill or _anyone_ to open up.

Finally, there was the sound of locks—a _lot_ of locks—being unchained, unbolted, and undone, and the door opened a crack.  An Oreo guard peered out at her.  “Yes?” he asked.

_Yes?_   Didn’t he see what was going _on_?  “Is Vanellope here?” Taffyta asked.

“The president is out currently.”

Taffyta wanted to scream.  “Well, when is she coming _back_?!”

“I don’t know, Miss Muttonfudge.”

She just gaped at the guard, and then Rancis grabbed her arm.  “Taffyta!  You stay here and wait in case she comes back.  I’ll go look for her, okay?”

“Oh…that’s…that’s actually a pretty good idea…”  She turned to the Oreo guard.  “Can I come in?”

The guard hesitated, which was odd.  No one had ever had a problem letting her in before.  Come to think of it, the door normally wasn’t locked…

But then he said, “I suppose I _could_ let you in…just stay in the throne room.”

As she entered the castle, the doors swinging shut behind her, Taffyta glanced out at Rancis, who still looked pale under the dark orange of the sky.  He gave her a nervous smile, then hurried back to his kart.  Then the doors slammed closed, the guard re-did all of the locks, and Taffyta heard the roar of Rancis’s kart as he drove away.

“What’s with the security?” she asked, hearing the nervousness in her own voice.

The guard didn’t answer, instead posting himself silently at the door and staring straight ahead.

Taffyta sighed and wandered towards the half-finished throne and Vanellope’s desk.  She stood in front of the desk, fidgeting, feeling her heart pounding, wondering where Vanellope was and when she was going to get back and what they were going to do and what if Litwak unplugged the game right _now_ , what if he didn’t even wait until tomorrow, and…

Wait.  Why…why had that thing appeared to begin with?  Why would the game go haywire, why would there be something wrong with it when that had never happened before?  Why was _Sugar Rush_ acting like it had been infected by a virus?

Taffyta’s heart went from pounding to still.  Her lungs felt like they were in a vice and she couldn’t breathe. _She_ had been infected with a virus.  _She_ had brought a virus into the game.  _She_ had felt something in her code just before that crevasse had appeared, like she was just corrupted enough, just permanently damaged enough, to respond to whatever was ripping the game apart.

This was _her fault_.

Her legs felt weak and she clenched her hands around the edge of the desk to keep from falling.She just wanted to get out of the throne room then, from the guard that she was sure was watching her, judging her—wouldn’t all the castle staff know she’d been there with a virus?  Nausea roiled in her stomach and she clenched her fingers tighter around the desk.

Then her prayers were answered.  Another Oreo guard entered the throne room, leaving the door open behind him.  Taffyta’s eyes darted to it and then, without giving herself a chance to think, she crept towards the door.  The guards were deep in discussion, gesturing towards the windows and the orange light pouring through them.  She took advantage of their distraction and slipped out the door into the hallway.

She didn’t even know where she wanted to go, she just—had to be alone, because there was an ache in her chest expanding and crowding out everything and she didn’t want to be in front of people when it burst and overwhelmed her.

She turned down a side corridor and then a sob hitched her throat and she just stopped, right where she was, and plopped down on the floor, putting her back up against the wall and covering her face with her hands.  Tears leaked out from under the heels of her hands and her sniffling echoed in the hallway.

Part of her was demanding that she stop it, get up, and do something constructive, _sure it’s your fault that the game’s about to be unplugged but stop being such a baby and_ help _!_   _Help people get out to Game Central Station, calm people down…something.  Anything._

A bigger part of her just wanted to sit there and cry.

She heard footsteps and curled up further against the wall, stuffing her fists into her mouth to keep her sobs quiet.  The Oreo guards were probably looking for her, but maybe they wouldn’t turn down this way if she was quiet—maybe they’d just leave her alone and let her be miserable—

Still, a squeak escaped her, and the footsteps stopped.  And then they started coming closer.

Taffyta drew her knees up to her chest and rested her forehead on them.  There was still a chance that whoever it was would ignore her.

“Taffyta?”

And, chance gone.  She looked up, scrubbing at the streaks of mascara on her face.  Turbo was standing there.  And she was so distraught that she didn’t even care that he was still supposed to be in the fungeon, not wandering around the castle.  “Just leave me alone,” she said.  “Go…go escape, or whatever you’re doing.”

“I’m not escaping.  Little Miss Glitch said I could have the run of the castle while she wasn’t here.”  There was a glitchy ghost image of King Candy for a second and he peered more closely at her.  “Oh,” he said, freezing and looking appalled.  “You—you’re…you don’t have to cry.”

“You don’t even know why I’m crying,” she sniffled.

He gestured towards the nearest window.  “That out-of-order sign probably has something to do with it.”

Taffyta stared at him for a long moment, and then, without even bothering to cover her eyes, she burst into wailing tears.

His glitch was audible, but she couldn’t see him as she cried, huge wracking sobs that made it impossible to breathe except in choking gasps.  

She cried a lot, but she hadn’t cried like this since…well, maybe ever, no that was a lie, she had sobbed and choked into her pillow two nights after the game had reset, after the excitement had worn off and she’d gone home finally, because everything had changed and her dearest friend had been taken from her, but not since _then,_ and she knew with every fiber of her being that this time, this would go on forever.  The despair pinning her to the wall would never leave her and she’d just cry and cry and cry until there was nothing left of her.

“It’s my fault!” she wailed.  “The game’s going to get unplugged because of _me_!”

There was such a long silence that Taffyta was sure he’d left.  Figured.  That was what he did, he abandoned people, he—

There was a feeling of movement at her side, and then a light, hesitant touch at her shoulder.  “You don’t have to cry,” King Candy’s voice repeated.

That only made her cry harder.

“Taffyta—”

“ _I did this_!”

King Candy, or Turbo, whoever he was, didn’t say anything, and Taffyta just wrapped her arms around her knees and kept sobbing.

Of course the tears stopped.  They always stopped.  Then she was left with hiccuping whimpers and burning eyes and she couldn’t see through the slick of tears.  Her face was caked with running makeup but she didn’t bother lifting a hand to wipe any of it away.  What was the point?  Snot dribbled down from her upper lip to her chin and was dripping onto her dress, anyway.  A little smeared makeup wasn’t making her look any worse.

“You don’t have to cry,” King Candy said, “becausthe it doesthn’t help anything.”

Then, to her surprise, he pulled a handkerchief out and wiped at her face.  All of it.  The tears, the mascara, even the snot.  He didn’t meet her eyes as he did it, but there was a little furrow of concern between his eyebrows that made everything, just for the briefest of seconds, better.  “You should go,” he said, his tone gentler than anything she’d ever heard from him, certainly in the last week, but maybe ever.  “Head out to Game Cthentral Sthtation.”

She swallowed.  “I should—I should stay and help—”

“What are you going to do, my dear?”

Taffyta looked at him, her vision sticky with tears and makeup, then acknowledged his point with a heavy sigh.  She’d done enough, hadn’t she?  No matter what she did to help, no matter how much she told herself she was making things better, nothing was ever going to make up for this.

Feeling miserable, she got shakily to her feet and hiccuped.  There was a jerky movement from King Candy, like he was going to help her, but then he glitched to Turbo and drew away.  “I’d walk you there, but I’m sort of under house arrest here.  And it’s not even my house anymore, hoo-hoo.  Guess the front door will have to do?”

“You don’t have to,” she said in a small voice, thinking she probably should have said _I don’t want you to_.

With a graceful twirl of his hand, he said, “I’m royalty, though.  That means I have to be chivalrous.”

Against her will, a watery giggle escaped her.  “You’re not _real_ royalty.  And right now you just look like a racer wearing pajamas.”

He plucked at the front of his jumpsuit and looked up at her, clueless surprise on his face that almost made her laugh again, despite the pit in her stomach.  “Pajamas?” he said.  “Really?”

As quickly as it had appeared, her smile vanished, and she didn’t respond to his question.  Instead, she asked, “What about you?  If the game’s unplugged, you can’t stay here.”

“Don’t worry about me.  I have kind of a knack for getting out of games that are having their plugs pulled.”

Taffyta swallowed.  That was all well and good, but…what if someone, she couldn’t believe Vanellope would do this, but Calhoun, even Ralph…what if _they_ wouldn’t let Turbo out?  The thought made her ill.

The two of them reached the throne room doors.  To Taffyta’s surprise, they were open.  She’d figured Turbo was being kept out of the throne room, since that was where the code vault’s access was.

When she poked her head in, saying, “Hello…?” she saw that the room was deserted.  “Seriously?” she asked no one in particular.

Turbo peeked in, snorted, and said, “I was never that impressed by the castle staff, I have to admit.”  Then, with a shrug, he stepped into the room.  Taffyta jumped to keep up with him.  If he tried to go into the code vault…she’d…well, she would…

Yeah, right.  If he tried to go in the code vault, there was nothing she could do to stop him.  But he didn’t even glance towards it, instead continuing to accompany her towards the castle doors.

Then she stopped and stood stock still in the middle of the room.  What was she _doing_?  This was _wrong_.  Not just leaving the game, but she couldn’t…she couldn’t leave Turbo here.  She couldn’t abandon him in the game—and she couldn’t trust him not to go into the code vault, no matter how much she wanted to.  

“I can’t leave,” she said.  “This is my fault and I have to stay until I’m positive there’s no hope.”

Turbo looked at her.  “There’s no hope,” he said.

She clenched her fists at her sides.  “There’s always hope.”

For a moment, he regarded her, and then he said, “You know, I used to think that way too.”

Blinking at him, surprised by this, Taffyta just said, “What?”

He let his eyes rove around the throne room.  “Yeah.  Back when _RoadBlasters_ got plugged in.  You know, I was pretty jealous, the way all the players just abandoned me for some fancy new game, when I was the _best,_ but everyone said, oh, don’t worry about it.”  His eyes narrowed.  “The twins especially, they were…I mean, I guess when you spend every day losing to the greatest racer ever you either get bitter or you get optimistic.  So they said, the players will come back, just have some faith, and you know, I actually tried?  I gave their _happy_ little fun-fest a shot.  Sure, the gamers would come back, they’d get tired of _RoadBlasters_.  Games didn’t get _unplugged_ , not at Litwak’s.”  With a mirthless smile, he looked at her and said, “Guess you know the next part of the story.”

Yeah.  He’d told her, after all.  She was silent for a moment.  Then she asked, “The twins?”

“ _TurboTime’s_ NPCs.  They couldn’t ever beat me.  Well.”  He shrugged.  “Every once in awhile.”

“Are…are they dead?” Taffyta asked, already knowing the answer.

Turbo’s eyes shifted, looking more past her than at her.  “There wasn’t much warning when Litwak pulled the plug.”

“You…”  Her next words spilled out of her without her meaning to.  “You killed your friends?”  The thought made her stomach shrivel.  Not just because…well, he’d done that, but…but what if that happened in _Sugar Rush_?  What if some people couldn’t get out in time?  What if Candlehead or Rancis got trapped here, and the plug got pulled, and that would be _her_ fault, she’d have to live with that, for the whole rest of her life.

“See?” Turbo said.  “Even monsters have stuff to have nightmares about.”

There was a lump in her throat that she tried, without luck, to talk around.  Finally, she said, “How can you act like none of it mattered?  The twins…they were your friends, and now they’re gone, and…”

“Well see, here’s the thing, Taffyta.”  Turbo curled his hands in front of his chest.  “You can either care or not, and the second you stop caring, the easier it is to do what you have to do to survive.”

Something in her snapped at that.  “What you did didn’t have _anything_ to do with surviving,” she said.  “You could have _survived_ without killing all those people, without taking over _Sugar Rush_ , that was all about…all about being the best, wasn’t it?  You had to be on top, everyone had to _like_ you and think you were the greatest.”

He drew back a little, but all he said was, “Hey, I did want I had to do.”

All she did for a second was stare at him, her eyes brimming with tears again, angry ones this time.  Then she turned away.  “I can’t believe I almost fell for this again,” she muttered.  “All you do is hurt _everyone_ around you.”

There was a sound, and then, “Taffyta?”

When she turned to face him, he’d taken a step closer to her.  He looked uncomfortable, and he was fidgeting, then glitching, like he’d lost control over it.  “What?” she asked.

The glitching didn’t stop.  “It wasthn’t about—”  _Glitch_.  “—hurting other games.  Or other people.”  _Glitch_.  “I justht wanted to _racthe_.”

She didn’t say anything.  Why didn’t he _get_ it?  Why couldn’t he _see_ how wrong he’d been?  In a voice tight with more unshed tears, she said, “But you _did_ hurt other people.”  _Your friends from TurboTime.  All those characters in RoadBlasters.  Vanellope.  Me._   “I _know_ that wasn’t what it was about.  That’s your problem.  Everything’s about _you_.  You don’t care about _anyone_ except yourself.  You’ve never stopped to think about how you’re going to mess things up for other people, have you?  And if you do, you don’t care—Vanellope was just in your _way_ , she didn’t matter.”

He glanced down at his feet.  His crown slid forward, then disappeared as he glitched to Turbo.  Then, looking back up at her, he said, “…sorry?”

Her mouth fell open.  “Seriously?”

Holding his hands out in a shrugging gesture, he asked, “Not good enough?”

She clenched at her sleeves, feeling her fingers digging into her own palms even through her gloves and her jacket.  “No, that’s not _good enough_!” she shouted in such a shrill tone that he took a step back.  She had never, ever spoken to him like this.  “You _tried to kill Vanellope_.  You tried to _kill_ her, Turbo—or—or King Candy, or whatever you want me to call you!  We’ve _all_ seen the video of her first race, we _all_ saw the way you—you rammed her kart, and tried to beat her up, and you were going to crush her against the wall and it doesn’t _matter_ if she would have regenerated, because you were trying to _murder_ her!”

Turbo stared, his hands curled in front of his chest again.  She wondered if he was going to deny it.  “I…” he began, then glitched back to King Candy.  “I wasthn’t…mysthelf.”

“Yes you were,” she said.

He opened his mouth, then glanced down at his hands.  Lacing his fingers together at chest level, he said, “It wasth all falling apart.  And I justht had to, had to, well you know, do _sthomething_.”  He grimaced.  “I don’t think I wanted to kill her, I justht wanted her out of the way.  I wanted that kart desthtroyed, and then…you know, I think life impristhonment in the fungeon would have been fine…”

“Oh, that’s really comforting,” Taffyta sneered.  “I’m sure Vanellope would sleep a lot better at night if you told her that.”

King Candy’s face twitched.  “I don’t care how the glitch sthleepsth.”

“Ugh!”  She threw her hands up.  “I was being _sarcastic_!  You think Vanellope’s losing sleep over _you_?”  Then she crossed her arms over her chest and stared at her shoes, the abrupt deflation making her feel flat and tired.  “You’d do it all again, wouldn’t you?  You’d lie about everything and lock up our memories, and you wouldn’t care at all.  It’s all about _you_ , and if someone got in your way again, you’d do whatever popped into your head so they didn’t mess up your perfect little _lie_.  Maybe you don’t plan on hurting people, but _you do_.”

He didn’t answer at first.  He also wouldn’t look at her.  Then, in a low tone, he said, “I don’t have any reason not to do it again.”

Anything that she might have said lodged in her throat, and all she could do was stand there, frozen, and stare at him.  His mouth was set in a thin line, his fists were clenched, and he looked… _mean_.  Like the deranged, glitching racer she’d seen on the jumbotron that other day that _Sugar Rush_ had been on the verge of destruction.

Taffyta couldn’t move.  Or speak.  Or do anything but feel like she’d ruined everything, and in twenty-five years…what was to stop her from becoming just like him?  _She_ could be the arcade’s new Turbo, the selfish taffy-brain who couldn’t think of anything except the fact that she wasn’t racing, and had brought down an entire game because of it.

The urge to flee rose up within her again, but she forced herself to stay.  After all, he’d just admitted he had no reason not to try to take over again.

Then, the throne room’s kart door opened up and a kart zoomed through.  With a screech, it came to a halt, and Vanellope leapt out, pulling her goggles off.  She caught sight of Taffyta and Turbo and glitched over to them, looking determined.

“Hey,” Vanellope said, looking between them and noticing, Taffyta was sure, the stricken, tear-stained state of her face.

“Howdy, glitch,” Turbo said, like the conversation he and Taffyta been having had never happened.  “Enjoying your last couple hours as president of _Sugar Rush_?”

Vanellope didn’t take the bait.  Well, not totally.  “Listen, Turbutt, I know that you know how to fix the code.  _I_ know that _you_ know that _I_ know.”

“I don’t follow,” Turbo said lazily.

Vanellope planted her hands on her hips and took a deep breath, then said, “Get the virus out of the game.”


	12. Chapter 12

There was a long silence.  

“That’s what it is, right?” Vanellope asked.  “The virus from _Extreme EZ Living 2_.  Litwak’s gonna unplug _Sugar Rush_ if someone doesn’t do something, and we both know that _you_ can fix it.  Probably in your sleep.”

Taffyta turned to look at Turbo, her eyes wide.  She hadn’t even thought of that.  And he hadn’t mentioned it.

But Turbo just howled with laughter.  “You want to let _me_ that far into the code?” he asked gleefully.  “ _Me_.  Seriously?”  His laughter echoed in the throne room as he doubled over, his arms wrapped around his stomach.  “Oh, glitch, you crack me up, you really do.  I already reprogrammed this game once but _you_ didn’t like my modifications, did you?”

Vanellope opened her mouth to answer, but then, the castle doors banged open.  Three figures came storming through, Sergeant Calhoun in the lead, with Ralph and Felix following close on her heels.

“Oh good!” Turbo said, straightening up.  “The gang’s all here.”

As the three of them hurried forward, Felix gasped, “Oh my land!  Vanellope, we came as soon as we heard—what’s going _on_ out there?  Everything’s gone completely squirrely!”

Calhoun wasn’t as thunderstruck as her husband.  In a blur of motion, she grabbed Turbo by the front of his jumpsuit, ignoring the racer’s flailing arms and choking noises.  “You knew about this, didn’t you, scumbag?” she demanded.

Wheezing, Turbo said, “Well I don’t—bleurgh, can’t breathe, can’t—”

Calhoun just tightened her grip.

“Hey,” Ralph said, “would you look at that, he’s finally getting some color.”

Turbo glared at the wrecker, went slack in Calhoun’s grip, and glitched.  She grabbed at him but there was nothing to hold onto for just long enough.  When he fell to the ground, he backed up but didn’t run.  Brushing his sleeves off, he asked, “Now, if you want to have a _civilized_ conversation?”

Ralph raised a fist.  “You’ve seen the code, you worthless skid mark, you knew that virus would get into the game and you let it happen!”

Turbo threw his shoulders back and glared up at Ralph.  “I saw _Taffyta’s_ code, dung-breath!  Because _you four—_ ”  He paused to raise a finger and jab it towards them.  “—didn’t want to let me have _access_ to any more of it!  If you’d let me in the _code vault_ like I’d asked, yeah, maybe I’d have noticed something.”  He rested a finger on his chin.  “But then again, I don’t know if I’d have _said_ anything…”

“Why you little—!” Ralph began, just as Calhoun grabbed for Turbo again.  The racer ducked out of the way, ended up a few paces behind Taffyta, and stuck his tongue out.

Felix pulled off his hat and threw it to the floor.  “Pull yourselves together!” he said.  “Tammy, Ralph, we’re not getting anywhere threatening to beat the stuffing out of him!”  He rounded on Turbo.  “And _you_!  You can’t just let this game be unplugged!  After all the trouble you’ve caused and after as _decent_ as Vanellope’s been to you?  You’re lucky we haven’t let this arcade tear you _apart_ , mister!”

“Wow, Felix, better be careful, or you’ll ruin your reputation as Arcade Nice Guy,” Turbo sneered.

“Do you even _hear_ what you sound like?” Felix asked.

“Loud and clear.  But okay, okay,” Turbo said, a nasty gleam in his eye.  “Let me think about your really _tempting_ proposal.”  All of them stared at him, and after a long, still moment, he shrugged.  “Nope, ‘fraid I can’t help you.”  He took a step backwards, and when no one followed him, he grinned, lifted a hand, and spun on his heel.

“Hey!” Vanellope yelled.  She glitched, teleporting and appearing in front of Turbo.

“Yow!”  Binary garbled his figure and he glitched to King Candy.  “You can _control_ that?!”

Vanellope ignored the question.  “You _lived_ here for fifteen years!”

Regaining his composure, King Candy laughed.  “ _And_ , asth everyone keepsth reminding me, I did stho under the _falsthestht_ of falsthe pretensthesth.  I’m a _criminal_.  Right, Ralph, Felixth?  Sthergeant Psthychopath?  You’ve sthaid it yoursthelf enough timesth, _Vanellope_.”

“Even if you weren’t supposed to be here, it’s still your home!”  Vanellope glitched violently.  “No one wanted me to be here either, remember?  But I never wanted to leave!”

“Sthort of a moot point, stheeing as _glitchesth_ can’t leave their gamesth.  But gee, I stho wish you would’ve,” King Candy sneered.  “I sthupposthe that wasth my fault though, hoohoohoo.”

Vanellope glared, but then something changed in her face.  A smug look came into her eyes and she said, “Okay.  Sure.  But I guess…”  She trailed off, and despite himself, King Candy looked curious about what she was going to say.  “I _guess,_ ” Vanellope went on, “that I’m just wondering why you went through all that trouble to cure Taffyta.  Since if you don’t do anything, she’s gonna end up as one of those poor homeless saps in Game Central Station?”

Suddenly everyone was looking at her, and Taffyta realized she was holding her breath.  Had she been holding her breath this whole time?  Was that even _possible_?  She really didn’t want to be in the middle of this.  In fact, she wanted to sink into the floor for causing this in the first place.  And for actually-sort-of-kind-of starting to like Turbo.  For starting to actually forgive him, despite everything.

King Candy stood very still.  He didn’t make eye contact with Taffyta.  He didn’t even look towards her.  “You know what, glitch?” he hissed.  “That’sth really none of your busthinessth.”

“Aw,” Vanellope said.  “Guess I hit a nerve there, huh, King Cavity?”

His eyes narrowed to slits and he bared his teeth in a snarl.  Calhoun pulled out a pistol and Ralph covered the distance between himself and Vanellope in about three strides.  Planting himself between Vanellope and King Candy, Ralph prodded the racer hard in the chest and said, “You better fix this game, lace doily, or _someone_ might make sure that you don’t get out when the plug gets pulled!”  Then he winced and looked down at Vanellope.  “If, I mean, kid.  _If_ the plug gets pulled.”

King Candy raised a finger.  “I’m telling you right now that if you make me go into that code vault, I’ll make _sure_ you regret it in the time _Sugar Rush_ hasth left!”

Ralph raised a fist, King Candy narrowed his eyes and smirked, and no one moved or said anything.  Then Ralph lowered his hand.  “You don’t really wanna walk away and leave this game to die, Turbo.”

Pursing his lips, King Candy said, “Why isth it that everyone thinksth they know me _stho_ well?”

Against her will, Taffyta made a sound, and King Candy’s fingers twitched into fists at his sides.  But he still didn’t look at her.  Instead, he turned towards Vanellope.  “Stho what’ll it be, glitch?  Going to sthend me in there?  Throw me in without a tether and lock the door, maybe?  Make sure I go down with the ship?  Which by the way, will go down a _lot_ fasthter with me in there.  Sthee, I know _exthactly_ which connectionsth to rip out to make life really mistherable for you…”  He paused, smiled, and twirled a hand.  “…and to make sure _you_ four go down with the ship, too.”

Through her haze of horror, Taffyta caught it.  Four.  Four, not five.

There was another long silence, the buzzing outside seeming to make the air vibrate inside the throne room, and seemed to make Taffyta’s code vibrate too, like because the virus was still in the game, it still had the power to have a physical effect on her.

Vanellope bit her lip.  “No, I’m not gonna make you go in there.”

He sneered.  “Good choicthe.”  Then, he looked around before shooting Vanellope, Ralph, Felix, and Calhoun a nasty grin.  “Well kidsth,” he said, “it’s been _fun_ , but I have to run.  Looksth like thisth game’sth—hoo-hoo— _terminal_ , y’sthee.”

Calhoun raised her gun.  “I don’t think so, junk pile.”  Without taking her eyes off King Candy, she said, “Vanellope, I _strongly_ recommend that you let me escort him down to the dungeon.”

“Fungeon,” King Candy muttered.  He glitched to Turbo.  “For a soldier, you’re really not much of a stickler for proper terminology, are you?”

“President?” Calhoun growled.

There was a stricken look on Vanellope’s face.  A conflicted look.  No kid should have had to make the decision that Vanellope was being asked to make.  But everyone was looking at her.  _Taffyta_ was looking at her and the thing was, she knew that what she wanted Vanellope to say was the wrong choice.

Turbo slid a foot backwards but Calhoun cocked the weapon.  “I might not be able to kill you,” the sergeant said to him, “but I’ll make _sure_ you’re incapacitated by the time you finish regenerating.  And I will _also_ make sure that you’re _not_ comfortable.”

His eyes narrowed but he stood still, glaring at Vanellope.  Her eyes were wide and she couldn’t stop chewing at the laces on her hoodie.

“Vanellope,” Calhoun said.

Ralph shot Calhoun a warning look.  “Hey, give her a second, okay?”

Another minute passed in silence, the hum of the virus still pervading the room, orange light mixing with flickering red that turned the green on the walls and ceiling to a sick non-color.

Then Vanellope hugged her arms around herself and stared at the floor.  “I know you’re probably right, Sarge, but I…I seriously can’t do that.  That’s what _he_ would’ve done to me.”

Turbo smirked.

“He’ll game-jump, kid,” Ralph said.  But it didn’t really sound like an attempt to change her mind.

Calhoun holstered her gun and unslung a compact bag on her back.  At the press of a button, it expanded into a floating board, which she jumped onto.  “No,” Calhoun said, “he won’t.  I’ll make sure I get to Game Central Station first.  They’ll know he’s coming.”  With that, she sped off, stopping only to throw the castle doors open.

Vanellope bit her lip and looked miserable, and like she wasn’t sure at all if she’d made the right choice.  And then she looked around and said, “Hey!  Where’d he go?!”

Ralph, Felix, Vanellope, and Taffyta looked around and Taffyta’s heart sank.

Turbo was nowhere to be seen.  And the lump that had been rising further and further in Taffyta’s throat now felt like it was choking her.

With a sigh, Vanellope’s arms fell to her sides, hanging limply.  She looked defeated, and that scared Taffyta.  For fifteen years, she’d _never_ seen Vanellope look defeated.  It had annoyed her before the game’s reset, she’d wanted nothing more than for the glitch to realize how worthless she was.  But now, Taffyta knew it was one of Vanellope’s best qualities.  “Sweet mother of monkey milk,” she said miserably.  “Some president _I_ turned out to be.  I couldn’t even manage to run this place for three months.”

“Hey.”  Ralph knelt down in front of her and put a finger on her chin.  “You ran this place better in three months than Turbo did for fifteen years.”  He glanced at Taffyta.  “You put your friends first.”

Taffyta swallowed hard.  “Anyway Vanellope, all of this is my fault.  If I hadn’t—”

“Hey, stop,” Vanellope said, and as though proving Ralph’s words, the president’s misery seemed to melt off of her.

“But—”

Pointing a finger at her, Vanellope said, “Nope!  Stop it.”

Ralph hesitated, then reached out a hand and patted Taffyta gently on the shoulder.  “Vanellope’s right.  Look, you made a mistake.  Sure.  _Everyone_ makes mistakes.  I did.”

With a teary snort, Taffyta said, “Yeah, but _your_ mistake ended up outing Turbo and getting Vanellope’s rightful rule back.  _My_ mistake’s getting my game unplugged.”

“Well,” Felix said, “it’s not _too_ late for _something_ good to come out of this…”

Taffyta shook her head and rolled her eyes, mostly at herself.  “Yeah right.  What, I’ll go after Turbo, and because we were friends, I’m somehow gonna convince him to change?  Fat chance.”  She hugged her arms around herself.  “Guess you were right, Ralph—I wasn’t much of a…a Turbo rehabilitation program at all.”

Vanellope looked sad.  “I know what it’s like when your best friend in the whole world acts like a total moron, Taffyta.”

“Hey,” Ralph said, though the two of them exchanged such an affectionate look that Taffyta knew he wasn’t really offended.

How did Vanellope do it?  How had she actually managed to hit on the worst part about all of this?  Crossing her arms tightly over her chest, Taffyta said, “Huh.  That’s a _really_ nice way of putting it.  He—wait.”  Her eyes widened as she realized…  “Wait, he is _not_ my best friend in the whole world!”

Vanellope raised her eyebrows.

“I mean,” Taffyta stuttered, “well, that is, I mean maybe…he might have… _before_ , when he was _nice_ , and not—oh, I mean when he was nice to _me_ —back when he wasn’t a different person…”  She trailed off, and her arms fell to her sides.  “But I guess,” she said quietly, “that he never really _was_ a different person, was he?  He was Turbo all along.”

Then, suddenly, it was as though a door opened in her mind.  King Candy had been Turbo all along.  _Duh._ She knew that.  Except, had she _really_ known it?  Because that meant that everything King Candy had been to her, all his kindness, his willingness to work with her, his affection for her that maybe had even been love—all of that was still part of him too.  Because she believed it was true, now—she believed that he’d cared about her, no matter what terrible things he’d done.  He’d cared about _someone._ And that was still in there somewhere.

At least, she was counting on it.

“Vanellope,” Taffyta asked.  “Can I borrow a kart?”

Putting her hands on her hips, Vanellope asked, “Don’t tell me you’re going to go after Turbo and because you were _friends_ , you’re somehow gonna convince him to change?”

Taffyta pulled her hat down over her eyes, a determined look on her face.  “I might as well try.”

 

* * *

 

The Royal Racer was fast.  Taffyta knew that.  But she hadn’t realized just _how_ fast it was until she was behind the wheel, her foot jammed down on the gas as she rocketed through _Sugar Rush’s_ empty landscape.  Any other time you had to be careful on the main road that led from the castle, and town, out to the Rainbow Bridge, because of the NPCs coming and going to Game Central Station.

Everyone was gone now, though.  Out of order sign or virus, it didn’t matter which was worse—together they meant hopelessness, and no one was willing to wait around for a last second miracle.

Well.  Not _quite_ everyone had left.

A lone figure in a white and red-striped jumpsuit was hurrying along the road.  Taffyta shifted and urged more speed out of the kart.  When she reached him, she yanked the wheel hard and spun around him, coming to a stop with tires squealing.  “You want to know why you shouldn’t leave _Sugar Rush_ and go take over another game?” she demanded, jumping out of the kart and striding towards him.

“Hey,” he said, pointing at the Royal Racer, seeming surprised to see it.  “That’s my kart!”

She ignored this and planted herself in front of him, hands on her hips, and said, “You think you’re some kind of martyr, don’t you?  You think _everyone_ in this arcade’s against you, because you were more popular than all of them, and then you went _Turbo_ and became this big monster.  So if no one cares about _you,_ then you don’t have to care about any of _them_.  You’re all on your own so you have to do _whatever_ it takes to get ahead.  Well, guess what, _you’re wrong_.”  She took a deep breath.  “Because there’s one person in this arcade who cares about you, and she’s standing in front of you.  And if you think that doesn’t matter, well—well then…”  Her arms dropped to her sides.  “Well, then the whole arcade was right about you after all.”

For a long moment, Turbo stared at her.  A few of Taffyta’s NPC fans, stragglers, hurried past on their way to Game Central Station, their footsteps crunching on the sugar cube road, loud in the game’s weird silence.  One of them shot a terrified look back at her.

Turbo crossed his arms over his chest, his shoulders slouched.  It was one of the few mannerisms that he didn’t share with his royal alter ego.  A sulky pose of bitterness and defeat that he hadn’t needed once he’d been king.  “I’m still not saving this game,” he said.  “So if the _glitch_ sent you here to guilt me into it, you wasted your time.”  

Taffyta clenched her fists.  “You could be a good guy again.  Just because you’ve done bad things…”  She trailed off and swallowed hard.  “You’ve done good things, too.  You were a good king, even if you weren’t supposed to be king at all, I mean…you were good at it.”  _And you were my friend_.  _I thought maybe you were_ still _my friend._

He took a step closer to her, his yellow eyes burning, but she didn’t move away.  “I _do_ find that touching, Taffyta,” he said, putting a hand over his heart.  “But sorry.  You can save your quarters.  _Game over_.”  Then he straightened up and touched a finger to his chin.  “Wait, have I used that before?  Well, whatever, it’s a good line.”

There was a familiar prickling at her eyes, but then she forced the tears away.  No more crying.  “You’re not sorry,” she said.  “You don’t even know how to be.”

With that, she turned, got back into the kart, and sat there for a second.  Then she stood up and turned towards him.  This wasn’t even to save the game.  This was just because _she_ needed to say it.  “I _loved_ you like you were my…my _family_.”

The only sound in the game was the humming of the glitch crevasse across the starting line.  Turbo stared at her, the expression in his eyes unreadable.  But he didn’t say anything.

She wasn’t even sure she wanted him to.

Gritting her teeth, she sat back down and punched the starter on the Royal Racer to drown out the hum.  Then she held her foot down on the accelerator, kicking up sugar dust, hoping that at least some of it got into his stupid glowing yellow eyes.

As she sped away from him, back towards the castle, he finally spoke.  “That sorry was sarcastic!” he yelled.


	13. Chapter 13

The worst part about walking back into the castle was the look on Vanellope’s face.  Only she and Ralph were there—Felix had left to go help the refugees in Game Central Station.  Taffyta hadn’t seen him, but then again, she hadn’t seen much.  Her vision had been a blur of narrow-eyed anger and hurt.

No one bothered to say anything.  There wasn’t anything to say.  The arcade opened in less than an hour, and _Sugar Rush_ would be unplugged.

Ralph broke the silence first.  “We should go.  Don’t wanna get trapped on the wrong side of the barrier.”

Vanellope’s eyes were huge, but she wasn’t crying.  Taffyta didn’t know how she could be so strong.  Shaking her head, the president said, “I gotta make sure everyone else is out.  Wynchel and Duncan said they’d report back—”

The castle doors creaked open at that moment and the police in question entered.  They took off their hats as they approached, and Wynchel said, “We checked every house in town, Madam President.  Everyone’s gone.”

“Oh.”  Vanellope looked almost disappointed, like she’d been looking for a reason to stay.  “Well, o-okay.  Thanks, guys.  I guess…I guess I’ll see you in Game Central Station.”

They nodded, replaced their hats, and turned to go.  Duncan hesitated, like he wanted to say something, but in the end he followed Wynchel out of the castle silently.

In the long silence that followed, Taffyta said in a small voice, “Maybe some of us can go live in _Finish Line_.”  Or maybe they’d never race again.  Any of them.  That seemed like the likeliest possibility.

It seemed horrible.

Patting Vanellope on the shoulder, Ralph said, “You’re gonna come stay in my game until…”  But he trailed off.  There wasn’t any ‘until’.  “Well, we’ll figure something out,” he finished instead.

The three of them stood there for another minute, and then Ralph said, “Kid, we really gotta go.”

Vanellope heaved a sigh and opened her mouth to answer, but then, the castle doors creaked open again.  Wynchel or Duncan must have forgotten to tell Vanellope something, because no one else—

But the figure in the doorway wasn’t Wynchel or Duncan.  

“You know,” King Candy said, giving the door a push with his foot to shut it, “the color sthcheme really came together in here a lot more when everything was sthalmon.”

Taffyta’s heart leapt and she put her hands over her chest without even realizing.  “You came back,” she said as he approached them.

He looked at her and shrugged.  “Looksth like it,” he said.  Then, turning his gaze to Vanellope, he asked, “Now, there wasth sthome _coding_ you wanted me to do for you?  I charge a nominal fee, of coursthe, hoohoohoo.”

“Cut the crap, Candy,” Ralph growled.

King Candy glitched, leaving Turbo standing there, looking smug.  “Here’s the deal—I save the game, and then you let me leave.  Because I _could_ have left.  And I didn’t.”  He raised an eyebrow.  “Sound good?”

No one said anything for a second.  Ralph and Vanellope glanced at each other, and Taffyta just felt…she didn’t even know.  Her feelings were all mixed up—she didn’t _want_ him to go, and she also didn’t want Vanellope to let him out because despite the fact that she cared about him, even after everything he’d done, well, there was still _everything he’d done_ , and she didn’t know what that made her but she realized she didn’t care anymore.

Maybe she was what she was.  She could be bratty, mean, she could and _would_ overlook terrible qualities in a person—but she never wanted to make the mistake of overlooking their good ones ever again.

“We won’t stop you from leaving,” Ralph finally said.

Turbo eyed them, his gaze suspicious.  “Good,” he finally said.  “But let’s just get one thing straight,” he added, jabbing a finger towards Vanellope  “I’m _not_ doing this for you, glitch.  In fact, you _being_ here is the main reason that I was about to walk out of this worthless game.”

“Uh huh,” Vanellope said.  “Heard it all before, Turbutt.  Seeing as you _are_ here, though, are you going to fix the code before the arcade opens?”

Turbo flicked sugar dust off his sleeve.  “Lead the way.”

“Oh, you _know_ the way,” Vanellope said.  “You just don’t know the unlock code.”

That made him sneer, but he followed Vanellope towards the code vault.  Ralph trailed them, keeping a close eye on Turbo, and the three of them disappeared behind the throne.

No one had even glanced at Taffyta—and that meant no one had bothered to tell her she couldn’t come.  She tripped over her own feet in her rush to catch up, and when she pushed the curtain aside, she stopped in her tracks at the alien environment.

The hallway she found herself in reminded her of the terminal.  Glowing blue tubes ran along the walls, which, along with the floor, were a sterile gray, and not made of candy.  At the other end of the corridor, a circular door opened into…nothing.  No, that wasn’t right, there was blackness beyond the door, yes, but there was a pulsing glow, also, which Taffyta couldn’t see the source of.

Under Ralph’s supervision, Turbo was securing a licorice rope around his waist.  He adjusted it, and when it slipped down his hips, glared and twitched it into a different position.  “For the love of C++,” he muttered, then glitched to King Candy, gave the rope a tug, and said, “Whew, alwaysth worked better with thisth outfit.”  Facing into the open doorway, he clasped his hands next to his head and said, “Sthweet, _swtheet_ code—”

“Hold on a second, pillow pants,” Ralph said, grabbing King Candy by the back of his tailcoat before the racer dove into the code vault.  “How do we know you’re not going to go in there and wreck everything in this game again?”

Yanking himself out of Ralph’s grip, King Candy smiled unpleasantly and said, “Isthn’t that _your_ job, Ralph?  Wrecking thingsth, hoohoohoo?”  He straightened his coat.  “I _create_ thingsth, I don’t desthtroy them.”

“Oh, except for when you tried to delete Vanellope’s code,” Ralph growled.  “And got _RoadBlasters_ and _TurboTime_ unplugged.  How are the twins, by the way?”  When King Candy’s face twisted into a snarl, Ralph grabbed him again, this time by a fistful of the front of his clothes.  “Just in case I’m not making myself clear: you’re not helping your case, Turbo.”

The snarl dropped off King Candy’s face.  With a giggle, he said, “Well y’sthee, that’sth the thing, my ham-handed friend.  I don’t _have_ to go in there.  _That_ I’m doing out of the goodnessth—hoo-hoo—of my own heart.  But if you want thisth game to be more than a dead cabinet with a blank sthcreen in—”  He pulled out a pocket watch and flipped it open, raising his eyebrows.  “—a mere thirty minutesth, you _do_ have to let me go in there.  And you have to trustht me.”

“Newsflash,” Ralph said, his voice growing louder.  “ _No one_ trusts you!”

Taffyta took a step forward.  “I do.”

Vanellope and Ralph both turned to look at her.  King Candy gave her an unreadable look, red flickering up his body from his feet to his crown.

Taking a deep breath, she repeated, “I trust him.  He’s going to fix the game.”  She met his eyes, and she thought she saw a flicker of a smile on his face.

Then he turned around again.  “Sure hope I have enough time for thisth,” he mused, then dove into the vault before Ralph could say anything.

Taffyta moved forward and stood next to Vanellope, peering into the blackness.  And then her mouth fell open in surprise.

The code vault was huge, _massive_ —black space filled with glowing boxes and wires that pulsed gently pink or purple in the darkness around them.  There was something pretty about it.  “That’s our game?” Taffyta asked in an awed voice.

“Yep,” Vanellope said.  “That’s the whole shebang, right there.”

King Candy was a dark blot moving against the glow, swimming through the air like it was water.  Taffyta glanced down at the licorice rope uncoiling as he moved further into the vault.  He’d had to trust _them_ , too, not to cut him loose in there.  As Taffyta watched him, she wondered how he knew where he was going.  And then she saw.

There was a section of code sparking an ugly acid green color.  A jolt of recognition shot through Taffyta—it was the same color as the powder she’d swallowed in _Extreme EZ Living 2_.  Now that she was watching it, she could see green spreading from code box to code box, creeping along the connectors between them—infecting everything.

King Candy paused beneath the cluster of infected code, his head cocked as he stared up at it and his hands fluttering as he treaded air to stay in place.  Then, with a kick, he shot up into the center of the code and was lost from view.

No one spoke.  Taffyta’s chest was tight.  It had taken Turbo three days or _more_ —she’d never actually asked—to cure her of the virus.  Now he had to fix a huge number of infected code boxes and he had less than thirty minutes to do it—and that wasn’t even good enough.  Because if there weren’t any racers available when Litwak checked the game, he’d probably assume it was an effect of the virus and unplug them anyway, even if King Candy _did_ manage to remove it.

Taffyta knew, suddenly, what she needed to do.  “Vanellope, I need to go—we need nine racers by arcade opening.”

Vanellope looked horrified, and Taffyta realized the president hadn’t even thought of this.  “But…that means people will have to come back…and if Turbo doesn’t fix this…”

“Yeah, I know.  But if there aren’t any racers…”

“I think I’m gonna puke,” Vanellope said.  She really did look green.  Kinda matched her hoodie.  “I thought being president would be a lot more fun than this.”

With a grimace, Ralph said, “I hate to say it, kid, but I think she’s right.  You’re gonna have to get some racers back in here.”

Vanellope swallowed.  “Don’t _make_ anyone come back.  Tell them to only come if they want to.”

“Duh,” Taffyta said with a smile, though it was the hardest smile she’d ever forced in her life.

Then she was off.  The Royal Racer was still right outside the throne, so she took it.

Game Central Station was chaos and Surge Protector tried to stop her when she ran into the main hall, having just skidded to a stop at the _Sugar Rush_ entrance, but she waved him away with a, “Not now, _seriously_!”  She’d probably be in trouble for that later, but she didn’t care, because she’d spotted some of her fellow racers not too far away, all huddled together and looking miserable and confused.

Taffyta ran over to them, wishing she had Vanellope’s teleporting ability so she could get there faster.  Candlehead, Rancis, Jubileena, Snowanna, Adorabeezle, Minty, Gloyd and Swizzle were all there, like _fate_ ; it was the perfect number, as long as either Vanellope or Taffyta herself raced.  “Hi guys,” she said breathlessly.  “Hey, look, you have to come back to the game before the arcade opens because if we don’t have nine racers then Litwak might pull our plug anyway because he thinks the virus ate us or something so please please _please_ come back with me Vanellope said I couldn’t make you but I know you’ll want to because you don’t want to be homeless!”

They stared at her.  Then, in a hopeful voice, Adorabeezle asked, “So the game’s fixed?”

For a second, Taffyta thought about lying.  _Sure_ , _game’s all fixed!  Nothing wrong anymore and you’re totally not risking your lives by coming back!_

“Not…exactly.”  And as the words left her mouth, she knew that she _was_ going to be the one to break the news about Turbo, because they were going to ask her why they should go back when the game wasn’t fixed, and she wasn’t going to be quick enough to come up with a story to fool all of them.

“What do you mean, not _exactly_?” Snowanna asked.

“Well…”

“You want us to go back when that thing’s still ripping the game apart?” Swizz asked incredulously.  “Who cares about _racing_ when that’s there?”

“It’s getting fixed,” Taffyta said, hearing the desperation in her voice.

“By _who_?” Minty asked.  “No one’s gone in, we’ve been watching.”

Taffyta bit her lip.  All of them were watching her, waiting for her to say something, and Vanellope was counting on her.  This was her fault.  Here was something she could do to fix it.

“Turbo,” she said.  And then, in case that wasn’t clear enough, “King Candy.”

The uproar amongst them was instantaneous.  Swizz thought she was full of it and let her know loudly, Jubileena started crying, Adorabeezle clapped her hands over her mouth, whimpering, Minty’s knees gave out and she just fell to the floor, Gloyd pulled his hat down over his face, and Snowanna let out one short and piercing scream before covering her eyes.

“Guys, keep it _down_ ,” she hissed.  And then, though the answer seemed obvious, she asked, “So…are you coming?”

“No!” Gloyd said.  “No, no, _no_ , no way.  He’ll lock up our memories again!”

Ugh, there wasn’t _time_ for this right now!  Taffyta clenched at her own hair with a hand and said, “Guess you’re gonna have to _risk_ it, Orangeboar, because if you don’t come with me we’re not gonna have a game!”

Jubileena sniffled.  “I can’t, Taffyta, I just can’t.  I’m scared of that virus thing, and of K-K-King Candy.”

“Turbo, you mean,” Swizzle said, crossing his arms over his chest.  “How do _you_ know about him, anyway, Taffyta?  Vanellope never said anything to the rest of us.”

“Well, I…”

“‘Cause I’m just thinking, you were always his _favorite_ , so maybe you and him are in, like, cahoots or something, and this is a trick,” Swizz went on smugly.

Taffyta’s mouth fell open and she stuttered a few meaningless syllables.  Rancis and Candlehead hadn’t said anything at all, and she couldn’t help remembering the way they’d both sold her out in the moment that the game had reset, and sure they’d apologized but it made her wonder, it really did, if _anyone_ would stick by her.  She was going to lose this fight, she could see that—they weren’t going to listen to her.  In fact she’d be lucky if they didn’t _turn_ on her, so she’d be homeless _and_ friendless—

“HEY!” a voice suddenly shouted at the same time that a flame flared.

Everyone turned to see Candlehead, her arms ramrod straight at her sides and an uncharacteristic glare on her face.  She stamped a foot.  “If Taffyta says we have to go back to save the game, then we better go back and save the game, and we _especially_ shouldn’t stand around here saying nasty things like she’s doing something to hurt _Sugar Rush_!”

“Yeah,” Rancis said, putting his hands on his hips and looking around at them coolly.  “Stop being a bunch of snickerdoodles.”

With that, he marched over to Taffyta’s side.  There weren’t words to express how much this meant to her—the fact that they were sticking up for her, they _believed_ her, they’d help…it still wasn’t nine racers but it was better than none.  Taffyta tilted her chin up, giving the others the same imperious look she’d always given them before to make them do what she wanted.  Candlehead was stomping over, too, but then, the other girl kept going right past Taffyta.

“Hey, Candlehead!” Taffyta said, her bossy look falling off her face as she whirled.  “Where are you going?”

“Um, _Sugar Rush,_ duh!” Candlehead said.  “I even brought my kart out here!”

Most of them had; Taffyta had noticed that, sort of, when she’d gotten to Game Central Station.  She turned back to the rest of them, feeling the tide turning with Candlehead’s declaration.

Snowanna was the first to break ranks.  “Well, if Candlehead thinks it’s a good idea,” she said with a smirk, following the green-haired girl.  Then Jubileena relented, then Adorabeezle, and soon the others followed, even Swizz, though he grumbled.  Those who hadn’t brought their karts hitched a ride with someone else.

The tunnel to _Sugar Rush_ had never seemed so long, but then again, seeing the light at the end of the cord was terrifying because she was leading her friends into a bad situation—she didn’t know what time it was but the arcade _had_ to be opening soon, and if Turbo hadn’t fixed the code…if he hadn’t worked a _miracle_ …

Taffyta shot out onto the Rainbow Bridge, in the lead, and couldn’t bring herself to look around.  Her eyes stayed trained on the road in front of her.  But then, as she steered the Royal Racer down the bridge’s steep grade, downshifting without thinking about it, she glanced up, knowing in her heart she was still going to see that glitchy red sky.

It was blue.

Her heart leapt in her chest at the fluffy pink cotton candy clouds floating serenely above _Sugar Rush’s_ perfect landscape, at the gorgeous, soft, creamy blue of the sky, washed clean of any malignancy.

“I thought you said it wasn’t fixed!” Candlehead shouted to Taffyta as she sped up to pull level with her, the other girl’s eyes shining with happiness as she looked around.  The Ice Screamer drifted a little too close to the edge of the bridge and Candlehead swerved back on course with a, “Whoops!”

Taffyta had already laughed and zoomed ahead, but a large figure racing towards the bridge made her brake and stop the kart in a cloud of dust at the bottom of the bridge.  The other racers zipped past her, their engines whining, on the way to the stadium, with Candlehead leading them.  But Taffyta stopped to ask Ralph, “Is everything okay now?”

Ralph paused and put his hands on his knees, breathing heavily, and answered, “Yep—that creepy game-jumping buddy of yours says so, at least.  Vanellope’s at the starting line, ready to go, she wasn’t kidding about racing being in her code—her driving’s enough to…well, whew, look, I gotta get back to my own game before the arcade opens—see you, Muttonchops.”

At the nickname—which she wasn’t sure she cared for—she blinked, and Ralph grinned at her before taking off at a sprint again, up the bridge and back to Game Central Station.

Huh.  Well.  Did this mean Ralph had forgiven her?  Second chances seemed to be a real recurring theme lately.

If Vanellope was at the starting line, that meant Taffyta wasn’t needed.  She put her foot down on the clutch, shifted, and hit the gas, skidding in a circle and heading towards the castle.


	14. Chapter 14

The castle doors weren’t even locked, and Taffyta wondered, as she pushed them open, if she was wasting her time coming here at all.  Vanellope and Ralph had made a deal with Turbo, after all—a deal that he could leave the game, that they wouldn’t stop them.  And there was no one here _to_ stop him, so even if Vanellope had been crossing her fingers to render that promise null and void, there was no reason he couldn’t have left already.  Sure, Taffyta hadn’t seen him on her way here, but he knew the kingdom like the back of his hand.  He’d ruled it—he’d explored it and _lived_ here—for fifteen years, after all, and he knew just about all its shortcuts and hidden roads and false walls by now.  If he didn’t want anyone to see him leave, no one would see him leave.

But he was standing in the throne room.

He was standing in front of the throne, actually, leaning a hand on Vanellope’s desk in blatant disregard of her placard’s directive, while he stared at the incomplete fixture.  His fingers drummed on the desk and his other hand was curled into a fist and resting on his hip.

Taffyta walked up behind him.  She stopped.  And then she cleared her throat.

Turbo turned around to face her.  They stared at each other for a long moment, and then Turbo tipped his helmet up and said, “You can say it.  I’m amazing.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” she said.  But then, she smiled.  “But…I have to admit, it looks like what you just did was…well, pretty amazing.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not the _most_ impressive thing I’ve ever done, but it was pretty good.  _Sugar Rush_ might need a few check-ups—and I’m actually not saying that just so I can get in the code vault—but she’s healthy again.”

There was no rancor in his voice.  He sounded happy about the fact that he’d saved _Sugar Rush._   She took a step closer to him, and then, she asked hesitantly, “Can you really leave the game?”

“Sure.”

“Even though you’re a glitch?”

“You know, my dear, if you want to learn the mechanics of it, and why I’m not a _glitch_ in the sense that your _darling_ president is, I’d be delighted to teach you some coding.”

She didn’t respond to that—though the offer was…tempting?  Not that there was ever anything she’d _do_ with that kind of knowledge…certainly she wouldn’t go into the code vault and maybe tweak anything in her own code, or in the code of those she was annoyed with…even if some people like Swizzle _frequently_ deserved it…

Shaking that thought off, Taffyta crossed her arms over her chest.  “So if you could leave the game,” she said, “why did you come back?”

Turbo raised an eyebrow at her and smirked.  “Well, it turns out I just like being imprisoned in my former home.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously?”  When Taffyta just stared at him, her arms still crossed over her chest, he blew a breath out through his mouth.  “Well, it turns out that…”  He hesitated.  “…it _does_ matter that someone in this arcade gives two bytes about me.  You know.  A little.”  He met her eyes.  “Okay, maybe…well, possibly more than a little.”

She lowered her arms to her sides.  Her chest was tight with an emotion that she recognized, but didn’t want to name.  “It does?”

Turbo put his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground.  “Yeah.”  He glitched and she saw his two forms overlaid on each other, shimmering in red, and he didn’t look sinister or scary.  He just looked like her friend.  Her friend who she thought she’d lost, in more ways than one.

Meeting her eyes again, he said, “Look, the other racers…I don’t have anything _against_ them, but you…”  He hesitated again.  “You were the only person that I really _cared_ about in this game.  And…that means that you’re the only person I’ve really cared about since _TurboTime_ got unplugged.  So.”  He cleared his throat, obviously embarrassed.  “I figured that was worth saving your game.  We’re a lot alike, but…you know, I…I guess I didn’t want you to go through what I did, and…well, I made _my_ choices.  But I didn’t want you to feel like you needed to make the same ones.”

There was a long silence.  Taffyta’s throat was tight—she couldn’t possibly speak, he’d just said…

A voice broke the quiet suddenly, startling both of them.  “Uh, it’s your game too, Turbutt,” Vanellope said, sauntering up to them.

She’d come in silently—probably glitched right through the doors, actually, because Taffyta hadn’t heard them open.  Turbo’s expression shifted immediately, becoming standoffish, and he said, “Hey, this is kind of a private moment, glitch.”

Vanellope waved this away.  “I know, it was getting really touchy-feely there, yeesh.”

“Vanellope!” Taffyta said.  “Aren’t you supposed to be racing?”

“I did one,” Vanellope said.  “But I had some stuff to do.  You know, real presidential stuff.  Like calming the masses about Turbo’s return, for one thing.  Nougetsia’s in my spot for the rest of the day.”  She thought about that.  “Well, maybe not the _rest_ of the day.”

Turbo looked around, leaning exaggeratedly to the left and right, and sniffed.  “Where’s your bodyguard?  ‘Cause I don’t think you’re going to be able to get me back down to the fungeon by yourself.”

“Oh, so you wanna go back to the fungeon?” Vanellope asked with a smirk.

Turbo returned the smirk and said, “Not especially.”  Then he glanced around the throne room.  “In fact, I was just thinking about heading out of the game.  You know, like you said you wouldn’t stop me from doing?”

“Then you can leave,” Vanellope said calmly.  “Good luck with that.  Write when you get work.  Actually, never mind.  Don’t.”

He smiled.  There was nothing friendly about it.  “You’re _really_ just gonna let me walk out of here…go back to Game Central Station…and jump to a new game?”

She gave him a remarkably similar smile back.  “The first two parts, yeah.  You might have trouble with the last one though.  See, once we figured out your code was part of this game, we took sort of a snapshot of it.”  Understanding dawned in Turbo’s eyes, and Vanellope’s grin got broader.  “Yep, kind of a…digital fingerprint, if you will, diaper baby.  And I just got back from giving it to Surge.  He should just about be done installing it on every single game portal in this arcade.  So you’re not going in or out of _any_ game without everyone knowing it.  Sirens, flashing red lights, SWAT teams, the whole shebang.”

His jaw stiffened and twitched.  “Well,” he said, his voice tight, “I don’t know why I’d wanna leave, anyway.  Where am I gonna go, over to those losers in _Finish Line_?”

Vanellope stuck her hands in her hoodie pocket and rocked back and forth on her heels, a smug smile on her face, but before she could say anything, Taffyta burst out with, “You’ll stay?  Here?  In _Sugar Rush_?”

His gaze shifted from Vanellope to Taffyta, his glare became a bemused blink, and he drew his hands up towards his chest, his fingers curled loosely.  “I don’t think I have much of a choice.”

“No, you…you do…” Taffyta said, glancing at Vanellope for confirmation.

“He really doesn’t,” Vanellope said in a matter-of-fact tone.  “Me and Ralph and Felix and Calhoun kinda want to keep him here so we can keep tabs on him.”

Turbo’s lip curled as he looked at Vanellope.  “Well.  Then I accept your _generous_ offer to stay in this game.”

“Aw, glad to hear it!”  Putting a hand on her hip, Vanellope said, “Then I think we can stick to the arrangement we had.  House arrest when I’m not around, real arrest when I am?”  Raising her eyebrows, she asked, “Deal?”

Turbo crossed his arms over his chest and looked around the room again.  “Sounds really great.”

“Deal or no deal, 8-bit?”

With a sneer, he said, “Deal.  And don’t expect me to shake on it, glitch.”

“Ugh, like I want your cooties?” Vanellope said, sticking her tongue out.  Then, she hesitated.  “And we can see how things go.”

Narrowing his eyes at her, he asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means we’ll see how things go.”  Shifting so that her hip was cocked in the other direction, she said, “You might get sick of the fungeon someday.”

“I’m already sick of the fungeon.”

Vanellope ignored this, skipped in place, and said, “And maybe if someone agrees to _chaperone_ you, you’ll even be able to leave the castle someday.”

Taffyta looked between the two of them, knowing that the only person in the arcade who’d agree to such a thing was her.  Turbo’s yellow gaze flicked towards her, but he just said, “A chaperone, huh, glitch?”

“Better than a prison escort, am I right?”

He just rolled his eyes.

With another smirk, Vanellope said, “Check this out, not _only_ did I just selflessly and at great personal expense offer to let you stay in my glorious republic—” 

“I thought it was a _constitutional democracy_ ,” he muttered.

“—but I’m even gonna do you a _second_ favor today—”

“Excuse me?” Turbo said.  “Me saving the game doesn’t cancel out one of those?”

Ignoring him, she said, “—which is to go hang out outside the castle, so you don’t have to go back to the fungeon right this second.”  She cocked a finger at Taffyta, said, “See you on the track, Taff,” and then turned on her heel and sauntered up the throne room’s green carpet towards the doors.

When the doors banged shut, Taffyta turned to look at Turbo.  Neither of them spoke.  There were…a million things to say, and Taffyta didn’t know how to say any of them.  She didn’t know where to start, she didn’t know…well, anything.  Except that he’d come back.  He could have left and he’d come back.  And he cared about her.

Maybe it made her a bad person—no.  She didn’t think she was a bad person.  But she knew she had her faults, and they maybe wouldn’t ever go away.  But knowing that King Candy really _cared_ about her and that Turbo _still_ cared about her—suddenly, that was all she really cared about, too.  Yes, he’d done terrible things.  No, she’d never excuse any of them.

She couldn’t not love him, though.

Taffyta scuffed a shoe on the ground and took a step closer to him.  “So,” she said.  “You, um, know how I was sick?”

“Yeah.  I remember that, believe it or not,” Turbo said.

She twisted a piece of hair around her finger and forced herself to look him in the eye.  “I never really thanked you for helping me.”

“Oh.”  Turbo lifted a hand, made a vague gesture, and then shrugged.  “Well.  I mean, I couldn’t let you die.”

Taffyta snorted with laughter that she hadn’t quite meant to let slip out.  It wasn’t funny, like, at all, but…King Candy had always had the ability to make her laugh even when she didn’t want to.  Turbo, apparently, could too.  It was still hard to think of them as the same person, but…she was getting used to it.  Turbo’s smile had some of King Candy’s in it, and King Candy’s eyes occasionally flashed with Turbo’s bite.

She offered him a small, shy smile.  “The thing is, it seems like there’s kind of a…a side effect from it.”

Turbo looked alarmed.  “What?”

She put her hands behind her back and looked up at him.  “I think I have a terminal case of…well, not being able to hate you.”

He glitched, flickering two or three times between Turbo and King Candy, before the latter was left standing in front of her.  He smiled.  “That’sth incurable, I think.”  Holding up a finger, he added, “But the good newsth isth, there’sth a sthate-of-the-art, _new_ treatment for sthomething like that.”  

Her smile twitched into a smirk.  “Glad to hear it.”

He hooked his fingers into his tailcoat’s lapels and said, “It’ll require a little effort on your part, though.  You’ll have to be the only persthon in thisth game whosthe brave enough to keep an eye on me when Presthident _Glitch_ Facthe letsth me out on the town.”

“Vanellope,” Taffyta said.

“Whatever.”

“ _If_ she lets you out on the town.”

He just made a noise at that.

She rolled her eyes.  But then she looked at him, with that smile on his face that had always meant the world to her—that smile that had been just for her—and she grabbed his hand.  He glitched in surprise, and his red binary traveled down his arm to their clasped fingers, where it pixelated her into blue.  She flinched but didn’t let go.  “I missed you,” she finally admitted.  Out loud.  To him.

King Candy looked speechless.  Then, he put his other hand over hers.  “You know,” he said, “I’ve sthpent the lastht three monthsth convincthing mysthelf that it wouldn’t matter if _you_ hated me.”

A lump rose in her throat and then, without thinking, she flung her arms around him.  For a second, all she did was cling, and then his arms went around her.  He glitched but this time she didn’t jerk away.  The feeling was getting less creepy.

She felt him sigh and for just a second, he rested his head on the top of her hat.  Then he gave her a tight squeeze and let go, taking a step back and fixing her with a pleased look.   “By the way, I thought I should tell you,” he said, an innocent lilt to his voice that Taffyta recognized as trouble.  “There’sth a little sthomething… _exthtra_ in your code now.”

“Huh?”

“Well.”  He clasped his hands behind him and rocked back on his heels, a bright, self-satisfied smile on his face.  “You never _sthaid_ it, but I figured the reasthon you, you know, _went Turbo_ in the firstht placthe was the sthame reasthon _I_ did.  You weren’t racthing.”

“What?  How did you…?” she asked, bewildered.

“Oh, Taffyta, my dear, we really _are_ very sthimilar.  Do you really think that after fifteen yearsth I can’t read you like an open book?”

Finally getting past her surprise that he’d guessed everything, she said, “Okay then, so what did you do to my code?”

He stuck the tip of his tongue out the side of his grin.  “Justht a little packet to make you a more tempting choicthe for that _randomizther_.  Doesthn’t sthurpristhe me _that_ sthwitch got flipped in the code.”

Her eyebrows shot up.  “You…”

“You’re welcome.”

“I totally wasn’t going to say thank you.”

“Sure you were.”  His grin got crooked.  “Eventually.”

She shook her head.  “You know I have to tell Vanellope.”  She thought about adding that it wasn’t fair.  Except, well, that was obvious, and honestly…she wasn’t sure that she cared.  But she knew Vanellope would.

Heaving a sigh, he said, “I wasth afraid you were going to sthay that.  But hey, no rush.  You can at leastht get in a good couple weeksth of winning before then.”

Taffyta tried to look stern, but a smile snuck onto her face.  She pulled a lollipop out of her pocket and stuck it in her mouth.  With the stick jutting from the side of her smile, she said, “Maybe I won’t tell Vanellope _right_ away.”

He glitched to Turbo and gave her a thumbs-up, a wicked smile on his face, as he said, “Turbo-tastic, my dear.”

Of course she’d tell Vanellope.  After all, she _did_ want to be better than the person she’d been for fifteen years.  But then again, she wanted to win, too—and you didn’t win without racing.

Turbo—King Candy—he was still a complication.  But Taffyta didn’t care.  _Life_ was complicated.  Life was messy.  And she wasn’t going to run from that anymore.  She wasn’t going to run from that ever again.

“Hey,” she said.  She dug in her pocket for another lollipop, then tossed it to him.  His hand darted out, and he caught it and twirled it in his fingers, his eyebrows raised at her.  Taffyta grinned and said, “Have some candy.”


End file.
